Martin's BCIM Website Blog

Today we had a BCIM Website Team meeting (Mike, James, Imran and myself) - mainly to discuss allocation of future work now that Imran has joined us. After reviewing the ideas in this wish list and some other, newer ideas, we discussed/agreed the following.

• Short- and medium-term tasks...
   
  • Martin
    • Review the Faculty Staff Handbook and the Briefing & Resources Handbook (these were handed out at the Faculty Awayday last week) and update our web pages where necessary to incorporate any updated and/or additional information.
    • Create new web pages to present information about the Faculty's Combined Hons courses.
    • Contact the QLS (the new student records system) project team to set up a meeting to discuss the possibility of us getting access to their database(s) - e.g. for student cohort email distribution lists, and cohort student photos.
    • Approach the owners of the various BCIM Research Centres etc. that currently have websites which are not in the "house style" to ask whether they would like us to create new websites for them. (I won't do this until we have the time available to undertake the work, though.)
   
  • Imran
    • Consider revising our home page (October to June version; here's a local copy) before we post it up again to replace our alternative (recruitment) home page, which is what we have at the moment; possibly to include a news ticker; need to liaise with Martin and James about this.
    • Work on the new Language Centre website. (They also need help to maintain their existing site, since they've recently lost the technician who used to do this for them.)
    • Review our existing StudentWeb and consider whether we can make any improvements. (Since Imran has been a student in BCIM for the past two years he's in a good position to do this.)
   
  • Mike
    • Work on a "Student Cohort Emailer" (is that a good name for it?) along the lines of our new StaffWeb Emailer to enable Course/Programme Directors and other members of staff (who exactly?) to email selected student cohorts, with the messages being archived in an easily accessible archive. We felt that a dedicated emailer would probably be better for this than Blackboard, but we probably ought to produce a written justification for this! (Maybe we could regard it as being an extension of the StaffWeb Emailer, rather than a separate system, given that it shouldn't be available for students to use anyway.)
   
  • James
    • Liaise with Imran and Martin re our home page (the first point listed above for Imran).
    • Review the Enterprise Activity Report (this was handed out at the Faculty Awayday last week) and update our web pages where necessary to incorporate any updated and/or additional information.
    • Consider developing a set of web pages and/or some kind of database-driven system to cater for BCIM alumni and other "friends of the Faculty"; this will involve liaison with those responsible for the University's alumni database as well as senior managers within our Faculty to decide what exactly needs doing.
   
• Longer-term...
   
  • Build up a collection of images for embedding in our web pages, as appropriate, to make our website more attractive.
     
  • We agreed to meet again in about a month's time to review progress and consider longer-term tasks.
   

After the meeting I had some further thoughts...

• I forgot to mention Geoff's request for more standardised "academic cv pages"; see the last point in this blog entry.
   
• The /bcim/ account is full of old files and cgi-scripts, left over from our initial website, and we need to give it a spring clean! Many of the old pages have been replaced by redirection pages - which display a note for a few seconds saying "please update any hyperlinks to this page" - but I think/hope that these have been there long enough that we can remove them at any time from now on.