Earlier this year it was decided the University’s homepage needed some modernisation. It’d been a good four or five years since we’d given it a thorough review. In that time there have been huge changes in technology, in the University’s strategic goals and (most importantly) in the way our audiences interact with our website.
Another change that has been developing during this time is the way that we in the University’s Digital Comms team approach web development projects. Things move fast in digital – and this applies to processes and project management every bit as much as it does as to technologies.
Over the last few years, we’ve been adopting aspects of agile product management and reporting into our work practices. As part of this, we’ve become way more reliant on using data to make decisions. We’re now using Google Analytics and user research far more than we used to.
This helps us to decide what areas of bristol.ac.uk we should focus on and how to improve the content in ways that measurably improve our audiences’ experience with the website (rather than ways that we think improve things).Continue reading: A new homepage for the University (part 1)