Work done in December in the Digital Platforms and Developments team

Here’s what we were up to before a well-earned festive break:

Consent Management Platform (aka “cookie banner”) implementation

Work continued on replacing our existing basic cookie banner with a consent management platform. Progress this month included:

• Lots of configuration and testing in Google Tag Manager to make sure that the correct things will happen based on whether website visitors say yes or no to advertising-related cookies.
• Styling the banner to match our brand.
• Customising the wording of the banner.

Blogs platform

• Work began on an updated on-brand theme for our blog platform (blogs.york.ac.uk). We started putting together a new theme in a development environment to familiarise ourselves with the current options for template development in WordPress.
• Removed an old version of a Google Analytics tracking script from our themes.

Documenting user testing options

In our Digital and Creative Services away day earlier in the year, a team action we picked up was around establishing routines for things we value, one of which was user testing. Initially just for use within Digital and Creative Services, we now have a wiki page documenting self-service testing options, and the tools we have that can be used for these.

HR web rebuild

We’ve been getting involved with the HR web migration project on a few fronts:

• Investigating options for automated importing content from the hundreds of Dreamweaver pages that make up the HR web content. This has included a prototype of using the API for the Terminalfour CMS to create a site structure and insert content items.
• Other supporting work such as generating lists of pages behind access control and looking into other technical queries about the migration.

Fixes and other improvements

• Solved an issue that was preventing us from seeing campaign traffic in Google Analytics for campaigns that had a Shorthand feature (pages on features.york.ac.uk) as the landing page.
• Added ‘Ad content’ values to the ‘Users and acquisitions’ screen of our Looker Studio analytics dashboard to help with identifying traffic sources.
• Updated our documentation about making emergency web edits to reflect a new process.

Other things

• Talking to our web CMS supplier about moving from on-premise to cloud hosting.
• Digital and Creative Services away afternoon + PechaKucha presentations (lots of fun!).
• Updating job descriptions for some vacant posts in the team.
• Our annual Performance and Development Reviews.