Posted by Emma O'Connell
|
0 comments
Just to say a really big thank you to everyone for all their hard work on the postgraduate, professional and research prospectus and we hope that you like the finished result. We've made quite a few changes to the content, format and design based on research conducted through heist and the personas we have developed for this audience. Copies will be distributed within the university soon, but you are very welcome to pop into 1D03 if you'd like to pick up a copy in the meantime.
We are currently planning the approach for the prospectuses for 2012 and some even bigger changes are on the horizon. We'll be sharing early ideas with admissions and marketing staff across the university soon but we would welcome any thoughts, ideas and feedback. Please email these to
Emma Watkins.
Posted by Nathalie Southall
|
0 comments
A few months ago I
posted an update on the international project for the uwe website. In the 12 weeks following this I continued on to 'stage two' with the main aim to give the content held by the
Global Student Support team more visibility across both the international and new students pages.
There’s no better place to hear good things about UWE than from the mouths of our students. As luck would have it, while I was still beavering away on improving the international web content, Sharon and Barbara in the Marketing, Planning and Campaigns team were chatting with a cross-section of international students about their experiences. The topics covered ranged from their life in the UK to their highs and lows at UWE and in Bristol. The final piece of the puzzle was to accompany these views with bright, modern photography, so when Sharon managed to organise a shoot, forgive the pun, in a flash, we were all set.
As well as being featured in the new Postgraduate prospectus (coming soon to a reception desk near you) and, no doubt, the future undergraduate equivalent, we now have
five dedicated student views on the international website. As well as this, there are now student faces popping up all over the in the
country-specific pages, which supports a key objective from the very start of the project - giving a real sense of community at UWE.
I blogged earlier in the year about the development of a new website information architecture (IA) that would support the needs of site users and help deliver the key business aims for UWE. While the IA gave us a roadmap for the website content, it also triggered the need for a design that would hold the pieces of the web puzzle together.
To respond to this, we started a design process with Precedent in March that would allow us to visualise the IA and create a new face for the UWE website. A process of workshops, evolution and user validation ran from April-July to develop and identify a clear design route. We needed a design which would engage a wide range of users, be fit for purpose on a large scale and would weather the storms of web design trends and brand development over the next few years.
I’m happy to say that after a good deal of work with Precedent, we found a winning design direction and signed off a range of page visuals last week. These will be the foundation for building a new face for the UWE website.
We can’t reveal too much at this sensitive stage of development, but the following things are true:
- The new design is a radical change to the website identity we have at the moment
- The new design has strong visual impact sewn into its ethos
- Adjectives such as fresh, clean and wow have all been used to describe the new design
We have a lot of work to do now turning the page designs into real web templates that we can use to build the information architecture. We will be sending out communications over the next few months with progress updates on this work.