Providing a low-cost video production service

More and more questions about video are coming in to our office. All too often, they are from departments that would like to use video to show off their unique aspects, but don’t have the skills or resource to make the videos themselves. Until recently, the only option that we were able to offer was to bring in an external video production company. The problem is that professional outfits like these charge thousands of pounds for a few minutes of footage – albeit polished, high quality, fully branded footage. Not only is this beyond the budget of both departments, the nature of the video is also not what many departments are looking for, so as a team we decided to come up with a solution. Continue reading

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Using… Blogs to boost your professional or departmental profile

Blogs

Blogs are a great way of communicating your thoughts and opinions on a subject, or of keeping your audience up to date with developments in your work. A blogging service allows you to create posts that are displayed in reverse chronological order. Typically, you can also apply categories to your posts, which allow your users to find other articles on the same topic. Departments or units can make use of the University’s blogging service (blogs.reading.ac.uk), but for individuals there are a broad range of equivalent options. Many are free, but for a small (usually annual) fee you could add a custom URL, such as www.yourname.co.uk. Continue reading

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Using… LinkedIn to boost your professional or departmental profile.

LinkedIn is a professional networking tool. It allows you to add connections to other users to develop an online network, providing a means of staying in touch with peers and colleagues. The profile format is rather like an online CV, so it gives users an idea of your professional interests and expertise. Continue reading

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Using social media to boost your professional profile or promote your department

On Wednesday 1 February, Emily Goodhand, the University’s Copyright Compliance Officer presented to the Digital Development forum on how she has used social media to boost her professional profile. (Why not read Emily’s post on the Digitally Ready blog or download Emily’s presentation slides.)

Emily is an avid Twitter user and tweets under the name of @copyrightgirl. By regularly tweeting focused, topical, considered comments and engaging in debate in the twittersphere on copyright issues, Emily has built up quite a following. As a result, she has been invited to speak at a number of events on copyright issues and her views on current issues surrounding copyright and intellectual property are well respected. Having built up a network of copyright professionals, Emily has also built up a virtual team that the University can draw on when complex copyright issues arise.

Twitter isn’t the only social networking tool that can be used professionally, and there are a    number of tools that you can use to boost your individual profile or that of your department.  Continue reading

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Case study 3: Film, theatre and television – developing new functionality

Film, theatre and television wanted us to help rework their undergraduate pages. The aim was to make the site appeal more to their prospective students, who are typically very visually oriented, and to show off their state-of-the-art facilities. Part of their request was for an image slideshow – functionality that didn’t yet exist within the CMS (see the post on image gallery slideshows in the CMS  for more on the development of this tag). Continue reading

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Case study 2: Campus Services – creation of service led sites

We were approached by Campus Services to update their web presence as part of a wider project to rework FMD’s online content. Our team worked with Campus Services to develop a suite of sites with a structure based on user needs, rather than organisational hierarchy. This included conducting user testing to identify the needs of University staff, as well as working with Campus Services staff to write content appropriate for the web, based on their internal documentation. Continue reading

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Case study 1: Merging departmental sites to reflect restructuring

As part of the University’s restructuring project, several departments within a faculty were merged. These mergers had to be reflected on the web, which sparked a project to combine several of the sites. This process didn’t always run smoothly, so we have these issues back into the way we work to ensure that future projects face fewer problems. Continue reading

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A year of sites, a year of lessons

Over the last 12 months, the Digital Development team’s chargeable service has grown and matured. This has meant that we have had the opportunity to do some hands-on work building of pages and sites, as well as developing functionality, in addition to our core service. As a result, the size and role of our team has changed.

At the same time, there has been a real surge in interest across the University in using a wide range of digital media to communicate with the diverse audiences that the University has. As such, we’ve covered a lot of new ground, as well as finding new ways to do things, so there have been a number of lessons learnt that we can build on to improve our service in 2012. In the next few posts I’ll cover some of the projects that have been completed in the last year and go into some details about what we have taken away from each. Hopefully these will be of some use to others embarking on web projects and will provide some insight into what we do and how we hope to improve our processes over the next year. Continue reading

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Image gallery slideshows in the CMS

Recently, I’ve been working on an image gallery slideshow for University web pages. There are a few examples of this now on the web, such as the Film, Theatre & Television homepage and the Researchers’ Night site.

The project was prompted by a request from Film, Theatre and Television (FTT), who asked us to help make their undergraduate courses section a bit more exciting. Continue reading

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Why no central University facebook until now?

I was recently asked why we waited until this summer to develop a central facebook page for the University, when other units in the University had already forged ahead.

I thought I’d share my reply:

Before opening up this additional central, or ’corporate’, communication channel we had to be sure of its business case and sustainability, rather than just ‘jump on the bandwagon’.

A couple of our brand values at the University are that we are ‘established’ and ‘focused’.  You could say that this shows in the tools and resources we use in our corporate day-to-day operations.  That doesn’t preclude other areas of the University from being more creative and ambitious (two more of our brand values) with their communications, which is why you might see developments outside the centre before they’re adopted at the corporate level.  This diversity of approach is possibly more evident when looking at the University’s use of social networking tools because the very nature of social networks is that different areas might need to build separate online social networks for their particular communities, e.g. people who ‘like’ the ICMA page might not necessarily be interested in the Film, Theatre, and Television page.

PS – I also noticed the person asking using this service http://followupthen.com/ - looks useful if you don’t already have follow up flags built into your email software.

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