Monday 8th December, 2008.

We held the fourth meeting of the Faculty Website Steering Group last week. In preparation for that I put together a second prototype...

• second prototype home page screenshot

...which we discussed at some length. The second prototype takes into account some the feedback on the first prototype. I created a Drupal account for each member of the Steering Group so that they can edit the site themselves, and we agreed on who would work on which sections.

There was a feeling that the professional body logos take up too much space, and it was suggested that it might be better to combine them into a single animated gif image that links to a page explaining which of our courses are accredited by which professional body. This would free up some space to feature a more welcoming smiling face or other such image.

We agreed that it would be good to have several distinct groups of brief ex-student (or possibly current student) testimonials - e.g. from business students, computing students, voluntary sector students, etc. On our "What our students say" page we could display (say) four of these; one picked randomly (automatically) from each of four different groups. In addition, we could display randomly picked single testimonials on other pages, with the testimonial being picked from a particular group according to the context. If we have such testimonials then each of the individuals featured will need to be contacted periodically, say once a year, to check that they are still happy to be featured.