{"id":1466,"date":"2026-06-05T16:34:27","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T15:34:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/?p=1466"},"modified":"2026-06-05T16:34:28","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T15:34:28","slug":"digital-platforms-and-developments-may-2026-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/communications\/2026\/06\/05\/digital-platforms-and-developments-may-2026-update\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital Platforms and Developments May 2026 update"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

New blog theme goes live, staff listings for interdisciplinary centres, replacing search with a visible input, ‘peaks and potholes’ and more<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Blog theme update<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Our updated blog template has started to roll out, beginning with this very blog! We’ve still got some documentation and further comms work to do before we roll this out to other blogs, but we’ll get there soon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Staff listings for interdisciplinary centres<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

We’ve completed our development work that allows staff who have an affiliation with more than one departments or centre to now exist in the CMS as one piece of staff member content instead of needing to be duplicated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Old field only allowing a single selection<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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New field that allows multiple selections<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The last part of this was how we handle departmental disciplines. They now only show up in the listing for the department that they’re associated with, and not if the same person appears in another listing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This has been put into practice for the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies and Centre for Medieval Studies rebuilds that are currently in progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Replacing search with a visible input<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Something that we didn’t get quite right in our redesign last year was that we moved from a standard search input box in the header to to a ‘Search’ menu item that revealed a search box when clicked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Current header with ‘Search’ link<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Our analytics review last month highlighted that on our homepage lots of searches were being entered into the course search box that are for internal terms – eg VPN, planon – which is likely explained by the course search being much more prominent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We’ve got a bit more work to do on the implementation but we’re hoping that this revised header design makes the site search more noticeable and that we see a reduction in the number of non-course searches being entered into the course search box.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Revised header with visible search input<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Peaks and potholes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Ahead of new starters beginning to join Digital and Creative Services we’ve been putting various actions into place that came out of our previous quarterly away morning. Our focus was on smoothing out some of the ‘potholes’ that new starters might experience, and building on the ‘peaks’ – the positive, memorable experiences – to strengthen them and make them more repeatable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A big chunk of this for me was checking through our Asana onboarding templates for both the manager and new starter, removing things that had got out of date and trying to make things as evergreen as possible by linking off to other web pages instead of replicating information in the project itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other things<\/h2>\n\n\n\n