As everyone across our Communications and Marketing teams is very aware, we are now well underway with a student recruitment web optimisation project. This slightly belated post is to introduce that work to a broader audience and set context for future posts. Going forward, myself and others in the team will share updates on what we\u2019ve done, what we\u2019ve learned, and the outcomes we\u2019re achieving as we work to transform our prospective student digital experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
About a year ago, the University decided to invest in long-term improvements to our website. The site is widely recognised as our single most critical asset for student marketing and recruitment. But to keep pace with evolving technical contexts and user behaviors, such as the rise of AI and changing web search habits, we needed to invest in improving and future-proofing the site. We set out a plan to improve our search engine visibility (SEO), refine our user experience (UX), and make conversion journeys smoother across our core recruitment pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because our existing teams were already working at full capacity, since early summer we\u2019ve been onboarding new staff to deliver this work. A web content team lead, three web content producers, a platforms specialist, and a front-end developer have all joined between June and August. These new posts, combined with existing staffing in Marketing and Communications, bring together expertise and workload capacity in content design, SEO, and technical development in a way that we\u2019ve never before been able to deploy in a targeted effort to improve the digital experience for prospective students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With all these new people joining and extra capacity to do new work, we needed a clear way to ensure we were spending our energy where it delivers the most value. We\u2019ve built a website maturity assessment framework and measured current site performance against that to give us clear context for our decision-making. We\u2019ve also established a structured prioritisation process and project governance through a new Student Recruitment Web Coordination Group<\/strong>. We\u2019ve built a backlog of prioritised projects to work through, starting with relatively quick-win foundational fixes before moving on to bigger and more complex changes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Over the past three months or so, we\u2019ve tackled a variety of projects that have helped new team members learn the ropes of the CMS, the university context, and all our other platforms. These have included:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lots of people around the whole organisation work on the website and student recruitment, and we\u2019re keen to keep anyone with an interest in this work informed and involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Starting on Friday 6 November from 1.30-2.30pm<\/strong>, and every first Friday of the month after that, we\u2019re going to host a student recruitment web optimisation project review on Zoom. Any member of staff at York with an interest in what we\u2019re doing is warmly invited to come along. We\u2019ll also record the sessions and share afterwards for anyone who couldn\u2019t make it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Each review session will be an informal show-and-tell where we\u2019ll talk through:<\/p>\n\n\n\nFirst projects<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Join us at our monthly reviews<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n