What we’ve been up to this month in the Digital Platforms and Developments team

Our November 2025 summary of what we’ve been working on recently.

Giving Day

We started the month with a big splash homepage takeover and countdown clock, plus banner across site for Giving Day 2025.

Published an updated accessibility statement following testing carried out earlier in the year after the launch of the new website design, and improvements made as a result of testing. Also some edits to bring it in line with required format.
Put a process in place to make sure the statement is reviewed annually.

Changes made to make tables much easier to read and interact with on smaller screens:

Columns sizes now automatically adapt to the amount of content in each column.
Tables with too many columns to fit on screen at once now have a shadow effect added to indicate that more content can be revealed.
All tables published from the web CMS now automatically get this functionality.

We’re replacing our existing basic cookie banner with a consent management platform. Progress this month included:

Presenting our plans to the Technical Design Authority (TDA) and working through the Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) and computing risk assessment (CRA) process.
Configuring our chosen tool – Civic Cookie Control – and testing it out in a preview environment.

Updated our press releases content type so that the central news branch can switch to from the old Classic layout to the newer Digital Pattern Library templates.
Actual switch over should happen before Christmas.

Discovery work and requirements gathering for updating the blog platform (blogs.york.ac.uk) to use a new on-brand theme.
Working on entry for the blog platform for the service catalogue.
Cleaned up a large number of spam post submission attempts and put measures in place to prevent them in future.
Definitely did NOT delete ALL the blogs for any more than 10 mins or so.

Added option to add in text about elective modules to postgraduate courses.
Added more entry requirement options.
Switched over to new version of Discover Uni widget on undergraduate course pages – see at the end of the entry requirements section on Biochemistry (BSc) for example.

Working with the Teaching and Learning Software Delivery Team in IT on a update to postgraduate course searches so that different navigation will be shown depending on whether you’re searching for taught or research courses.

Fixed an issue with printing web pages in Chrome that meant it was attempting to print thousands of pages or crash entirely on some pages.
Fix for analytics tracking on embedded YouTube videos.
Resolved issue with Siteimprove broken link checking so that links to module catalogue entries are now checked.
Overhauled the student events page code in preparation for an upgrade coming to the MyUoY app’s CMS.
Fixed the “People Database Administrators” page that had fallen through the cracks during the great DPLv2 upgrade.

Staff profiles Classic to Digital Pattern Library migration: starting on foundation work and figuring out how we’d do the swap to allow us to update all staff profile pages to a new design.
Digital Pattern library documentation: foundation work on replacing our old documentation pages for web developers.

Making some improvements to the design of the homepage.
Ideas for how we can make user testing routine in web content projects.
Data about rooms on campus: I joined a meeting of the Space Data Working Group for an interesting discussion about the very complicated topic of room data (and all the many disconnected systems where it exists).

We had an insightful morning of training from the Data Protection team.
This talk on Design KPIs: How To Measure UX And Show Impact of Design from Vitaly Friedman at border:none 2023 conference has got me thinking about new ways of measuring success.

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