Boosting organic search traffic to the Dental School webpages

Posted on by Rosie Morse

Digital Marketing Officer Rosie Morse explains the SEO work she undertook to support improvements to Bristol Dental School‘s section of our website.

This year, over a third of the traffic to the University of Bristol website came from search engines. And yet, organic search is often overlooked as a marketing channel.

In 2023, the Dental School webpages were reviewed and improved in line with the opening of its new school location. An external agency led on user research, the Digital Experience team did the content design, and I provided some SEO insights to support the project – with the goal of increasing organic search traffic to the Dental School webpages.

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Week Notes: no data, no truth

Posted on by Rhiannon Davies

The next post in a series of Week Notes from our Deputy Director of Digital Experience, Rhiannon Davies.

Find out more about what ‘week notes’ and ‘working in the open’ are, and why they’re great.

Data and Analytics has definitely been the theme for this week, both in terms of things I’ve been working on, and things I’ve been thinking about…

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Week Notes: looking backwards and looking forwards

Posted on by Rhiannon Davies

The first post in a series of Week Notes from our Deputy Director of Digital Experience, Rhiannon Davies.

Find out more about what ‘week notes’ and ‘working in the open’ are, and why they’re great.

Coming back from summer holiday last week, distinctly autumnal weather, a slightly confusing three day week, and waiting for a new boss to start, has meant the last week has felt like some kind of weird twilight time before the new academic year kicks off. A great moment for a bit of reflection.

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Building campaign landing pages, part 2: a sprint to deliver

Posted on by Jamie Forsyth and Joshua Morris

In this second of two posts on campaign landing pages (read part one), Josh Morris (Senior Front End Developer) and Jamie Forsyth (UX/UI Designer) discuss using a sprint approach to create campaign landing pages at the University.

We brought together experts to work in a ‘sprint style’ fashion over three weeks, aiming to deliver campaign landing pages that could be built and maintained within our institutional content management system (CMS), TerminalFour Site Manager.

Our experts included marketers, external agencies, product managers, content designers, user interface/experience designers, developers and other stakeholders.

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Building campaign landing pages, part 1: a reusable approach

Posted on by Jamie Forsyth and Joshua Morris

In this first of two posts on campaign landing pages, Josh Morris (Senior Front End Developer) and Jamie Forsyth (UX/UI Designer) discuss streamlining the process of creating this type of content at the University.

In the past, the Digital Experience team has been very reactive. A stakeholder would give us a task like “I want a new website”, and we would go off and build it. Sounds OK on the face of it, right? However, this type of reactive approach is an inefficient way of working, and more often than not wastes time and resources.

Our team is trying to pivot to a more strategic approach – identifying and solving problems in a more centralised and reusable way.

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Keeping it real – optimising ‘social proof’ in postgraduate recruitment

Posted on by Nabila Hisbaron

A great indicator that you’ve designed a delightful user experience is having happy customers advocate for you, speaking positively about your products to family, friends, and – if you’re lucky enough to make an influencer happy – their online followers.

This is an example of ‘social proof’, and in this post our UX Designer Nabila Hisbaron talks us through our use of social proof to support postgraduate student recruitment.

In a recent user research sprint, we learned just how important social proofing can be for potential postgraduate applicants.

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Understanding digital in the context of a university

Posted on by Rhiannon Davies

The term ‘digital’ is ubiquitous and has become a part of our everyday vocabulary – the digital revolution has impacted every aspect of our lives. And universities are no exception, digital transformation has brought significant change to the way we learn, teach, conduct research and work.

So, what does ‘digital’ mean in the context of a university? Rhiannon Davies, our Deputy Director of Digital Experience, shares her thoughts.

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Is data the only way to identify priorities in improving our digital services?

Posted on by John Bourne

John, our Senior Digital Product Manager, looks at our approaches to decision making and discusses how a relentless focus on data alone can be an issue for our team.

It’s vital to ensure your digital products are data-driven, right? Countless blog posts champion and showcase how to utilise data in a better way. But how do you manage this with limited resources?

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Easy improvements for users of the Students’ Health Service

Posted on by Vicky Gierat

How we combined data and knowledge to make a category page work better for users. 

A category page (sometimes called ‘section homepage’ or just ‘homepage’ here at the University) fulfils many functions on a website. It showcases the service, is usually the most visited page, and is the one page above all others that senior staff want a say in shaping.  

The real purpose of this page is often lost in the ‘make it look dynamic!’ hype. As all good content designers know, websites exist to give our users what they need, and the number one place to do this is the service category page. And yet at the University we often find category pages are plagued with issues such as: 

  • the content our users want is hard to find or missing altogether.
  • content loses focus because of ad hoc changes over time. 

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PDFs and accessibility, part 1: making our organisation chart accessible

Posted on by Rob Mayo

Organisation charts presented in PDF format are one of the worst offenders when it comes to accessibility. Rob, from our Content Design team, explains how he turned one such chart into accessible HTML content.

When the bristol.ac.uk site was audited by Government Digital Services last year, one of the main issues that we had to fix was inaccessible PDFs.

PDFs pose particular problems for anyone with accessibility needs. It is possible to painstakingly add all of the structural tags for titles and headings so that the PDF passes accessibility criteria, but it’s unlikely that the effort will pay off; if someone finds 99% of PDFs that they encounter inaccessible, they’re not going to take the risk of opening another.

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