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Tuesday 18th November, 2008.
Here's some feedback on the first prototype from the guys in Marketing Services, and from Mary in the Faculty Website Steering Group.
We should keep web search optimisation firmly in mind. This means we should ensure that key words and phrases appear in our page titles (<title></title>), main (<h1></h1>) headings and hyperlinks. With this in mind, the phrase "What we offer for students" wouldn't be a good primary tab name. It would be better simply to use the word Courses, because this is what many prospective students will be looking/searching for.
If we change the "What we offer for students" primary tab to read simply "Courses", it might look odd to leave the "What we offer for companies" primary tab as it is. We could call this "Business & Enterprise" as in the draft ESBE Faculty website, or something like "Business Services".
With shorter tab names, we have space for additional tabs. Perhaps we should reinstate the Research tab for consistency with the HSC and ESBE Faculties and many of our competitors' websites.
If we provide prospective students with a choice to select between Foundation and Undergraduate courses this may confuse those interested in doing a Foundation Degree. It might be better to present a choice just between Undergraduate and Postgraduate in the fist instance, and then to present those who click on Undergraduate with a brief overview of the various kinds of courses we offer below Masters level.
It's really important to display professional body logos on our home page. I've included the BCS and CMI logos within the first prototype, but ideally we should also display logos from the CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development), ACCA (Association of Chartered Certified Accountants), CIPFA (Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy) and ICSA (Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators). I think that the best way to create space for these would be to omit the image of the jumping girl.
We should stress Careers; perhaps not in a dedicated section, but wherever relevant.
We should present relationships between our undergraduate courses and any Masters courses that follow on naturally from them.
Under "Partnerships" there are a number of different types of partnership we can present, including collaborations with UK FE colleges, overseas University franchises, professional bodies who accredit our courses, companies, NGOs(?).
Prospective students are unlikely to be interested in our Departments or Programmes, since these are essentially just to do with our internal management structures, so perhaps we shouldn't include them within our website at all. (We could/should include them within our StaffWeb.)
Instead of Programmes, we should organise our courses into the "clusters" that are soon to be defined. We can add the cluster names as tags to the online prospectus pages for our courses, and this should enable us to include dynamically generated course listings within our web pages as appropriate.
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