Thank you to everyone who joined us for our website redesign preview session on 19 June. It was great to see so many people there and show you all what we’ve been working on, and we hope you’re as excited as we are for the launch.
A recording of the session and a copy of the slides are now available. This blog post outlines the key information covered in the session.
Timeline
The key dates for the final stages of the redesign process are:
- Monday 23 June to Tuesday 8 July: Testing and feedback
- Wednesday 9 July to Sunday 13 July: CMS access and website publishing suspended to allow migration of new design from test to live system
- Monday 14 July: Website redesign goes live, CMS access reinstated and website publishing resumes
Details of each of these stages are below.
Check your pages on our test server
We’ve set up a test server where you can preview a copy of the whole website and see exactly how it will look once the new design is switched on. You can access the server at brandpreview.york.ac.uk (University network or VPN only, login required).
Please take a look at this server and check over the pages in your section of the website to make sure everything is looking as you’d expect it to. We’re very keen to hear any feedback on anything strange that looks like it might be the result of the reworked design, such as instances where content can’t be read, accessibility issues, or anything that doesn’t look quite right.
The copy of the website on the server is from February this year. Naturally, some content will have been updated on the live website since then. We don’t need to hear about any out-of-date or inaccurate content, because we’ll be applying the new design directly to the most up-to-date version of the live website.
Similarly, if you spot content that could be improved but doesn’t look to have anything technically wrong as a result of the redesign, we don’t need to hear about that as part of this testing. If it’s something that you would like to change on the live version of the website, please use the contact details on the page or talk to the relevant department, or email communications-support@york.ac.uk and we’ll work on that with you separately.
Giving feedback
You can log any issues or queries directly on the draft web pages using a simple feedback tool called Bugherd. You’ll just need to look at the draft page, click a button and then leave your feedback alongside the content in question. Everyone working on the site will be able to see everyone’s feedback and comments to save duplication.
To give your feedback:
- Access Bugherd the first time you’re giving feedback to activate it for your browser. You just need to do this the first time you’re giving feedback and you’ll need to give your name and email (but you won’t need to create a password)
- Visit brandpreview.york.ac.uk to see additional testing information and then browse the site as normal, giving feedback using the floating widget on the right-hand side
If you would like to leave general feedback on the redesign as a whole, please fill out our feedback form. Positive comments are very welcome, as of course are any ideas for improvements.
CMS and publish downtime
On Wednesday 9 July, the website will stop publishing updates and access to the Web CMS will be suspended. This will allow our team to move everything to the live server and test it thoroughly, so please bear with us through the disruption.
Any website updates will have to be made manually by the Communications team and so will be limited to urgent updates only. If you know you have time-sensitive content that needs to go live between 9-14 July, please get in touch with us at communications-support@york.ac.uk.
We look forward to hearing your feedback about the new design.