Marketing and Communications blog

The CIM Bristol and West Branch organises visits to organisations in the region. These are a really good opportunity to get a behind the scenes view of the marketing of different types of organisation. You can also get 1.5 CPD hours from the CIM for those of us seeking to achieve or maintain Chartered Marketer Status.

The next one is to Wessex Water on the 9 May. For more details see the CIM website.

We’ve been tracking our web metrics for quite a while now to see how much of our website traffic was accounted for by users accessing the site on mobile devices.

It’s no surprise that this figure has risen dramatically over the last year and so we acknowledged that we needed to respond to this trend and look at how the website met the needs of mobile users.

One of the options available was to develop a bespoke mobile optimised site which would serve content in templates specifically with mobile handsets in mind. However, in light of the range of devices we would need to account for we decided to look at how to adopt responsive web design.

Based on a fluid layout, a responsive design approach would allow our web pages to adapt to a wider range of devices and give users an experience optimised for their specific device. It’s a trend that is being adopted by many websites, but you can see some HE website examples here.

Because the UWE website uses a defined set of “page types”, we had a consistent set of designs to develop and test. This was one of the major benefits that came from rebuilding the website structure in 2011.

After testing and refinements with our talented colleagues in IT services, the new responsive pages were rolled out in February and have been well received by users. The most noticeable changes can be seen in the behaviour of the website global navigation and search function which adapt well to smaller screen resolutions (see below).

There are more innovations being developed for the website this year and I look forward to posting more about those soon.

In my last post about our YouTube channel I mentioned the work that we have been doing to produce a suite of videos highlighting student success stories where UWE has played a central role.

The complimentary feedback and popularity of the videos has meant that more are planned and other text based stories have been added to the mix. This gave rise to a problem - how do we create an attractive and intuitive web interface to navigate this ever-growing family of stories?

u+we stories videowall

The solution has now been published as our u+we stories scrolling videowall. This graphically rich and interactive new feature of the UWE website allows us to present the stories along with titles, and summaries that appear when you roll over a tile with the mouse.

Digital marketing

The tiles that make up the wall can, and will, be reshuffled for campaign reasons or when new stories come online, giving us a flexible and expandable resource. Our videowall is already playing an integral part in the current international recruitment campaign.

Many thanks to our friends in IT Services for the technical wizardry.

Hope you like it.

 

DigitalBristol is a community for like-minded people in and around the Bristol area who want to stay up-to-date with the ever changing digital landscape, and meet-up, network, learn, and share. 

This month's speaker is Giles Colborne Managing Director at cxpartners. He works on strategy and user experience for major brands' web mobile presence worldwide. Giles is the author of the highly-regarded book , 'Simple and Usable', about designing simple, powerful web sites, mobile apps and interactive devices.

The event takes place this Thursday (9 February) at Horts Bar, Broad Street, 18.00-21.00 and is free - although you need to book.  More information can be found on Eventbrite.

If anyone fancies going let me know and perhaps we can make an outing of it!