In the last couple of months we’ve been: getting ready for Clearing; improving our website search; changing the CMS publish schedule; filtering out AI bots and lots more.
Getting ready for Clearing
A-Level results day is coming up in August so that means there’s been a flurry of activity as we get everything ready. This year that has involved:
- Our regular annual tasks for getting things ready to deploy functionality changes on course pages and vacancy listings, which vary through the different phases in the run-up to results day.
- Adding in some further functionality to simulate how the course pages and vacancies will display in these future phases, by using ‘flags’ as URL parameters that let us turn individual functionality elements on or off.
- Creating a testing spreadsheet that lets us run through a checklist of what should be visible at each phase.
Replacing search with a visible input
In last month’s update we shared our plans to replace the ‘Search’ link in the header with a visible search input box. This went live in June and as a result we have seen a large reduction in the number of non-course search terms being entered into the course search box on the homepage.
Changes to CMS publish
Shortly after the latest CMS upgrade went live, we deployed our changes to the Web CMS publish schedule.
After having this running for a couple of weeks, we’ve been seeing that it only takes around 15 minutes for changes to go live in our hourly publishes.
Filtering out AI scrapers from Google Analytics data
We recently noticed that traffic from automated AI scrapers was representing a large proportion of our recorded traffic in Google Analytics, and had been growing over the last year or so. There has always been the potential for some bot traffic to make its way into Google Analytics reports, but we were seeing some unexpected locations such as Singapore – a common origin for bot traffic – becoming our top traffic source.
As an interim solution until Google updates their automated filters, we are now filtering out traffic in our Data Studio dashboards based on screen resolutions known to be used exclusively by bots.
Other things
- We’ve completed the recruitments for two of the posts in our team, and are excited to have two new starters joining us in Digital Communications Platforms Specialist and Senior Front-end (Web CMS) Developer roles soon. A further Web and User Experience Designer vacancy will be going live shortly.
- Tasha and I ran a Asana knowledge share (Communications team members can catch up with the slides and recording).
- I attended the UCISA Web Services Community Day in Leeds. Lauren Tormey from the University of Edinburgh has a great writeup of 4 takeaways from the UCISA Web Services Community Day.
- Supported go-lives for various department rebuilds, including the first two interdisciplinary centre rebuilds (going live today) : Health Sciences, Psychology, Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies and Centre for Medieval Studies.
- The Student Voices blog switched over to use our new blog theme.
- Following the CMS upgrade we’ve been liaising with TerminalFour (the CMS supplier) on a few bugs.
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