HR pages go live, getting close to completion with blog theme update, reviewing the analytics for our site-wide navigation and more.
HR pages go-live
The newly-migrated HR pages went live, meaning that we can say farewell to another large part of the site that sat outside of our central web CMS and used an old version of the design. As part of the go-live our we had our routine set of technical jobs to do, plus some unexpected issues to deal with in getting redirects to work due to the old pages being on non-standard server infrastructure.
Blog template update
Nearly there – we’re hoping that by the time of our next update we’ll have gone live with the new design on several of our blogs. Work this month has included:
- Continuing to work with MRAO on the specifics of the Student Voices blog.
- Planning out the documentation and comms work needed to migrate other existing blogs to the new design.
- Finalising a new CMS content type that will allow listings of blog posts to be embedded on our web pages.
Staff listings for interdisciplinary centres
We’ve continued to work on a solution for staff who belong to more than one department or centre, so that management in the web CMS is simpler and doesn’t require duplication. The last part of this is how we handle departmental disciplines, which we’re continuing to work on.
Analytics review of site navigation
When we launched our new site design back in July 2025, this introduced several new methods of navigation to the site, including global nav that appears on all pages. We plan to do a more in-depth review of how effective the navigation is once we have a new Web and User Experience Designer in post, but this was an initial review of data from Google Analytics data to see how the various menus are being interacted with and how this differs across desktop and mobile. Gemini was very helpful here in synthesising a large amount of data and pulling out patterns. Generally things look to be working well, but we’ll be picking up some small improvements in the coming months.
Other work
- Progressing recruitments, hoping to have some adverts out very soon for posts in our team.
- CMS work for annual updates for undergraduate courses.
- Clearing planning: working with MRAO on user journeys and thinking about improving the testing we do.
- Wrapped up news branch rebuild project: last issue to solve was some blank listings appearing in a couple of places.
- CMS discussions with IT about future plans and upgrades.
- Prioritising projects for the upcoming quarter
- Attended IT Services Big Room Planning and had lots of useful conversations.
- A few small tasks to help get the York Festival of Ideas 2026 website up and running.
Until next month 👋
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