Meeting with Mary L.
Mary is currently doing the ABS (
Association of Business Schools) course for Marketeers; this consists of half a dozen sessions (?) spread over the academic year. There are representatives on the course from various UK business schools. Mary said that at the last session the presenters critiqued the website of each of the participants' universities. They said about ours (the About page in particular) that it was too rambling, and it's not clear who the intended audience is supposed to be.
The best websites were said to be those of Warwick Business School, INSEAD, and Harvard Business School. It's no coincidence that these are three of the most prestigious business schools in the world. Furthermore, each of them has a team of people employed to work exclusively on marketing and recruitment.
Amongst the points Mary and I discussed this morning were the following.
Out of date web pages
Mary was quite appalled when I showed her that some of our web pages are still dated 2005. I explained that our web pages have (hidden) expiry dates and designated owners, and that owners of expired pages receive weekly reminder messages asking them to check their web pages and notify either me or Mike C. to request updates or to confirm that no updates are necessary - in which case we just update the page date in the footer and reset the expiry date. Some pages owners respond to these reminders quite promptly, but others don't respond at all. I mentioned that both Geoff and Jane are aware of the problem.
Lack of news stories
I mentioned that we aren't very good as a Faculty at publicising news stories. Mary said that she had noticed that! My default StaffWeb home page announcement is a request for colleagues to give me more suggestions for newsworthy stories, but I get very few.
Relationship to online prospectus pages
I explained that we have our own Faculty web pages for many (although not all) of our courses, which in most (?) cases present more detailed information than is available within the online prospectus. As far as I know, we are the only Faculty that does this; the other Faculty websites contain much less material than ours, partly because they rely more on the University's online prospectus pages. Mary and I agreed that it seems right for us to continue to host our own course pages, and that the online prospectus pages (and also the printed prospectus pages) should state that further information is available from our Faculty website. Mary said that in her experience prospective students very often want to have more information than is available in the prospectus about the course(s) they are considering applying for, especially in relation to course structure and content.
Downloadable leaflets
Mary pointed out that many of our course leaflets are out of date. On the other hand, since more attention is now given to web pages it seems less important to offer printed/printable leaflets.
"Meet our people" pages
Mary echoed
what Jane had said about the importance of presenting profiles of existing students and recent graduates. She mentioned that it would be good to have, for example, short video clips of students giving PowerPoint presentations in front of their classmates, perhaps followed by them talking informally afterwards about their experiences. We discussed the possibility of setting up a process for this kind of thing; we thought that this might be something that could be assigned to a placement student.
New web templates
I explained to Mary that we will need to re-work our website in the style of the new Health & Social Care website, and that I intend to do the bulk of the work for this over the summer - at least in terms of preparing a shell for our new website, as I have described
here. This fits in reasonably well in terms of timescale with Mary's ABS course. Since that finishes in June, we should be able to incorporate any apparent "best practices" that Mary learns about into our new website - or at least set things up with planned future developments in mind.