Towards a new JISC website
JISC watchers will know that the organisation is going through a major reorganisation at the moment. There’s loads of information about this on the JISC website so I won’t attempt to badly summarise it here (the news article, “JISC announces new structure to reshape for the future“, is a good place to start).
The new JISC requires a new website – and that’s where we come in. We’ve been chewing over the best way to do this. The JISC website is large and complex and it will take some time to transform it completely. However, it needs to keep apace with and reflect the changing organisation, and align with key milestones on the road to the ‘new JISC’. Time is not on our side in this respect; so we will be approaching the project in phases.
Phase 1 will concentrate on creating a new ‘corporate hub’ for JISC online. It will have a new information architecture, a new design and revised content. We are also going to build the phase 1 site on a new platform, Drupal. I’m really excited about this as it’s a CMS I’ve been interested in for a while. This is a chance for us to evaluate Drupal under working conditions before making the decision to move the entire site onto it (or explore alternatives) in phase 2.
We have partnered up with user experience and design agency, cxpartners, to take the project forward. We’re at the early stage of stakeholder and user research but I will be sharing stuff as its available and we’d love to hear your feedback. Keep an eye on this blog or follow me on Twitter.
jisc.ac.uk survey – let us know what you think
As part of the upcoming development of jisc.ac.uk we’re running a quick survey to gauge where we are now.
If you’ve used the site, and are happy to answer a few questions, you can take the survey now…
…and along with being part of the future development of the site you’ll be in with a chance to win a £30 Amazon voucher.
Services section revamp
We’ve revamped the Services section of the JISC website.
As well as improving the look and feel, we’ve tried to make it easier to browse the range of services that JISC offers and quickly identify the services offered by our principal providers, such as JISC Advance or Edina.
The content and structure of each service page has been revised, providing a concise and scannable introduction to the service and a high profile link to its website. Where possible, we’ve included video overviews of the services.
This project was completed in response to audience feedback and we hope the section now better meets the needs of our users. So any comments or suggestions for improving the section further are appreciated.
5 month roundup
Tumbleweeds rolling through this blog the last few months. No coincidence really that my last post coincided with the departure of Kerry from the team, bringing the grand total to … well, me.
So it’s been firefighting, stopping things falling off the website and covering Kerry’s role as best I could these last 5 months, helped by a great temp, Lisa, who has manned the web inbox and covered the day to day support of the CMS admirably.
Looking back, we have actually managed to achieve a few things over this time, notably:
- Moving hosting companies: The website now runs on a virtual platform at ULCC, replacing our old web kit that was rapidly approaching end of life. Back end developments aren’t sexy or normally of much interest outside of the team but the big benefit of the move is the speed of the website and, notably, the CMS, which always suffered from performance issues on the old kit. It feels like a different bit of software. Most gratifying as this was always the biggest gripe about the CMS from its users.
- Revamp of the About JISC section: 25% of visitors to the homepage go to the About JISC section and it was long overdue an overhaul. So we now have an About JISC page that simplifies who we are, what we do and how we work – and also spells out the JISC acronym (it’s interesting how many users get really hung up about this, even though ‘Joint Information Systems Committee’ raises as many questions as it answers). The IA has been simplified, the content refreshed and we have a historical timeline, built for us by Stefan Goodchild from the open source software developed by MIT.
- JISC Involve moves to JISC Advance: We facilitated the move of JISC Involve, the blogging platform for the .ac.uk community, to JISC Advance (run on a day to day basis by JISC Mail). JISC Involve was a project that was run on a best efforts basis by the team but a couple of pinch points, such as a difficult upgrade, made us realise that we couldn’t adequately support it on current resource levels. It was always the intention to move it to a JISC Service if it proved successful (which it has) and so I’m really pleased that JISC Advance and JISC Mail have taken it over. I wish them all the best in running Involve and hopefully developing it into something bigger and better.
And last, but by no means least, we have recruited a new Digital Content Editor. Richard West joins us from UWE, where he was Web Editor in the Marketing and Communications Department. He brings skills and experience in content management, design, social media and digital marketing to the team – and is most welcome (after 5 months on my own!). Let’s hope he’s a blogger, eh?
JISC Mobile is live: what do you think?
We have today launched JISC Mobile, a cut-down version of the JISC website, optimised for mobile use.
The site contains recent content that users are likely to want to access whilst on the move, such as news items or podcasts. It doesn’t contain all the content on the JISC website and links are provided on every page back to the main site for those who want to explore further (although the main site is not optimised for mobile devices).
JISC Mobile is a pilot service and we have deliberately started small to assess demand and get early feedback from users. Please help us to improve the site by telling us what you think, if you value such a service, and what other JISC content you would like to access on your mobile device.
It is also a ‘beta’ service, i.e. it uses new technology that is still in its development cycle. The site might sometimes fail or give unexpected results. Again, you can help us to improve it by reporting any bugs.
JISC Mobile was developed for us by ILRT at the University of Bristol, based upon their Mobile Campus Assistant software. The software was initially developed via a JISC-funded Rapid Innovation project and is being further developed in the MyMobileBristol project under the JISC Business and Community Engagement programme.
The application harvests content from a number of external sources (in our case, RSS feeds from the JISC website) and converts them into RDF for storage in a database. This RDF Store is then queried via a RESTful interface that outputs the content in mobile-optimised HTML. The benefit of this approach is that we are not having to create and maintain content separately for the mobile website. It uses existing data that only needs to be managed in one place.
JISC Mobile has extended the functionality of Mobile Campus Assistant. One of the main challenges was the developers needed to build code to identify and transform data structures within the source RSS so they are optimised for mobile. For example, tables are linearised in the mobile version as multi-column tables do not work on a small screen and we took the decision to remove all images to increase the performance of the pages, especially over 3G (and slower) networks. As with Mobile Campus Assistant, the code developed in this project is open source and is available on Github.
Some interesting issues arose as a result of working within the limitations that mobile imposes. For example, the importance of microcopy came to the fore. We needed to change the ‘Supporting Your Institution’ section on the main website to ‘Institutional Support’ on the mobile version because the former label would not fit on a small screen. It’s a less than ideal compromise as it subtly changes the meaning, from an active to a passive mode. Unless we want to maintain 2 separate versions of our content (and we don’t have the resources for that), this illustrates the need for content strategists to consider the mobile experience from the outset, from the length of headings to the use of data structures within pages. As the demand for mobile access to the web is increasing rapidly (and will overtake desktop access in a matter of years), our content needs to get in shape; snappier, leaner and more flexible.
JISC Mobile is available at http://m.jisc.ac.uk/. We’d love to hear your comments and please report any bugs. There is a feedback page on the site itself or email us at web@jisc.ac.uk. If you blog or tweet about it, please mark your posts with #jiscweb so we can find them.
Note: This blog post was also published on the JISC corporate blog
Thinking about digital strategy
I’ve been thinking a lot about digital strategy over the past couple of months as we get our digital communications plans together for the next year or two.
It’s very hard, and I can see why many digital teams don’t have an explicit strategy document that they wave proudly around at anyone that asks. The technology moves so fast, strategies are almost out of date the moment they are written. There is always vastly more that you can do and want to do (and other people want you to do) than you are ever able to do with available time and resources, that is is very difficult to put the lid on the box once you’ve opened it. Managing people’s expectations is also hard – you want to enthuse people and get them on board, but not over-promise. It feels easier and more realistic to keep things flexible and high level, with fuzzy visions for strands of work, but workload management and bidding for funds requires project plans, SMART objectives and clear deliverables. It is a tough balance.
But it’s also great fun – and I mean that! It’s a great excuse to spend days reading websites, blogs and books, but the best bit is sitting around drinking strong coffee and having interesting conversations with clever people who are doing, or thinking about, interesting and clever things in this area.
Our thinking, incorporating very helpful feedback from colleagues in JISC and Services, is coagulating into a plan which has 5 strands of work: platform, content, tech development, engagement and measuring/monitoring. Here are our broad thoughts under these headings.
The platform stuff centres around the not-entirely-novel notion of using the best tool for the job and having a ‘mixed economy’ of systems, instead of a monolithic web CMS that tries to do everything (but not that well). We’ve already started down this road with the JISC corporate blog, which is integrated with the website but runs off WordPress. Of course, this approach throws up a number of issues; significantly, supporting multiple systems and the users of those systems. Single-sign-on is a must, as is insisting upon intuitive, easy to use systems. But there are still resource implications that need to be addressed if we go down this road.
We must improve the clarity, brevity, relevance and comprehensiveness of our digital content so that the full range of what JISC is and what is does is understandable to a non-expert audience. We have been heartened by the positive feedback received about the new Supporting Your Institution section. We need to extend and learn from this approach in other sections of the site. It is no mean feat; JISC is, after all, involved in technically complex, difficult to understand stuff. A sub-theme in the content strand is making our content useful for machines. This is an area where I could get geekily carried away but I know I need to reign myself in and concentrate on use cases and cost/benefit analyses! Increased use of RSS is a no-brainer but I’m not convinced RDFa will add much at all to our corporate website. If I can enable it easily (via the CMS, say), then fine, but I think I’d prefer to concentrate on making our general markup more ‘semantic’, which will probably involve moving our code standard to HTML5 (and working out a way for our CMS WYSIWYG to stop writing such awful code).
Metrics need to be in the front and centre of our approach, especially in these economically-straightened times. We need to be able to demonstrate the use, and crucially, the impact and value of our digital communications. We are not selling anything, so this means thinking carefully about what constitutes ‘conversions’ in the use of our content. And it needs to cover ‘social analytics’, gathering evidence on the use and ROI of JISC social media. Brian Kelly has done some interesting thinking about social analytics (see recent post on ‘Assessing the value of a tweet‘, among others) and it is this type of creative success criteria that we need to develop.
And then there is digital engagement, which we want to do more of, but recognise that to do it right requires a lot of work. In truth, this is the area that needs a little more thought but, currently, I think there is value in exploring how we can integrate existing, standalone engagement tools such as JISCPress with the website and to develop transparent processes so that people are assured that their views are acknowledged and acted upon. We should build on the good work already taking place around ‘amplified events’, such as the JISC Conference. There is also opportunity in that many staff within JISC are long-standing and often fairly prolific users of social media. It is not the role of the Comms team to control these individual channels but I think we could do more to aggregate and curate this content, and make it visible to a wider audience. We’ve made a start with the social media widget and page on the website, but we need to develop it further.
I’ve already talked about some development stuff, such as a code refresh for the JISC website and increased use of RSS. I think the look and feel of the JISC site is getting a little old now and could do with an overhaul, not least to make the graphic design more flexible for different presentation layers within the website. We’d also like to create a mobile version of the JISC site, but start small and power it by feeds, at least initially. We were impressed by the ILRT approach when they came to talk to us recently about MyMobileBristol. I liked it because it was a ‘one web’ solution, using a harvester to transform existing data into RDF for use by the application. I’m not convinced about mobile apps for us as a team at this stage. I’d much rather concentrate on the mobile web as the primary channel and consider any apps on a case by case basis.
Don’t bother to comment. All of the above is now out of date 
JISC Inform – from print to digital
After 29 printed editions, JISC Inform 30 will be going online. We thought fellow communications teams and individuals in education, faced with the same challenge, might like to know how we are taking an established printed publication and moving it to work on the web. This is new for us and you could say a little out of our comfort zone.
As universities and colleges are under increased pressure to reduce their costs, printed to digital is one way to achieve possible savings not just financial but also environmental. And with the trend for moving campus prospectus online, how we go about making this transition happen could help you do the same.
For those of you who have regularly received your printed copy of Inform each term, thank you for your feedback and we hope you’ll enjoy this new version. The idea is that in the future you’ll be able to access Inform via your mobile device, ebook reader or computer whenever and wherever you are. This is the vision, so our first digital version will be a stepping stone.
We are aiming to create:
- The look and feel of a printed publication but as interactive webpages
- A flexible publication that can be read as a single magazine or as standalone articles and click through to other content on the web
- A space for your to add your content.
So why share this journey with you?
Putting something on a website sounds simple enough….
So we are left with a lot of questions about what we thought JISC Inform could become and what it could look like.
This is where our journey begins….we have questions, lots of questions. How will it work technically? What content are we going to include? What will it look like? How will people read it and access it? Will our well established 10,000 readership of the printed Inform move with us? How do we create a whole new experience for our readers?
JISC Inform 30 will be launching in March 2011 as a beta site.
We’re not sure that we’re going to get it right first time but we hope you find the journey of interest, as we weave our way through making it happen.
The JISC Digital Communications Team blog is dead…
The JISC Digital Communications Team blog is dead. Long live the JISC Digital Communications blog.
This started out as a team blog, with the aim of keeping people up to date with our work and our thoughts. However, as digital now permeates so much of what we do as a Comms team, from events, through PR, to publishing and engagement, it makes sense to widen the scope of this blog to bring in other voices. So we are dropping the word ‘team’ – and the URL still works. Yay!
This is a good thing. My team haven’t been the most prolific bloggers so far and you might see a bit more activity on this blog from now on. So, apart from my occasional missives, you will be getting the likes of Bex and Hector documenting our journey and learnings as we move JISC Inform to a digital platform, for example.
They might even inspire me to post a little more often 
CMS procurement: Time for open source?
I attended the Plone in Business seminar this week, organised by Netsight as part of the annual Plone conference, being held this year in sunny Bristol.
To be honest, I didn’t learn an awful lot about Plone but it was a very useful afternoon as there were some good speakers on the procurement process for CMS’s generally and where open source software (OSS) fits into the market.
First up was Mike Grafham from Deloitte. He said that the CMS market is massive these days and it’s actually very hard to pick a CMS. You need to be very clear about what you want to use the CMS for, which means spending time thoroughly analysing your business and user needs. The technology is in fact not half as important as content governance models and he noted that projects usually crash because of requirement or process failure, not failure of the underlying tech.
Mike posited 4 rules for CMS selection:
- Know what you need it for (and what you might want it for in the future). You might also want to consider that the locality of vendors and getting on with them are pretty key requirements
- Run a structured selection process. You need to win hearts and minds and bring along the people who are ultimately going to be using the product. When looking at CMS’s, it is useful to know its provenance and its core market e.g. higher education
- Consider a proof of concept - helps reduce risk. I’m increasingly of the opinion that this is essential. You need to see the CMS actually working with real content or you simply do not know if it is suitable. So you should try to get vendors to build you a prototype. However, it was noted that this might actually put open source vendors at a disadvantage as they do not have the sales budgets of proprietary software to take the strain. Although, the point was made that Plone, for example, is very quick to prototype in
- ‘Open source doesn’t matter’. Controversial comment to make at an OSS conference! But it does drive home the point that it is the processes, people and requirements that are important, not the flavour of software. Predictably, this stirred up some audience comment, such as open source protects the customer in the case of vendors going bust; you own the code and data. But I guess this comes down to exit strategies, which all CMS projects should have. What do you do if it all goes horribly wrong (as it will at some point).
I was interested in how you got from point 1 to 2. Last time I ran a CMS implementation project (here at JISC), we opted for an open tender process and got absolutely inundated. Mike suggested that once you have your requirements together, that is the point to call in the experts that know the market and can draw up a shortlist of suitable candidates based upon these requirements, the market you are in, budgets etc.
I suggested that the days of the monolithic, enterprise CMS might be coming to a close. Mike felt they would persist because it was in the interests of IT departments to maintain one system, both from an administrative and a financial point of view. A pragmatic assessment, but a little depressing nonetheless.
Next was Graham Oakes, a consultant who helps organisations select CMSs, talking about OSS in the public sector. He felt there were some really strong open source CMSs these days that were the equal of any proprietary system; these include Drupal, Plone, Joomla, Umbraco, Hippo, Typo3 and eZ. The benefits of OSS for him were:
- Low up-front cost, which allowed you to do proof of concepts or pilots with no major outlay;
- Easier to work with (but only if you have the skills);
- The lack of licensing issues means apps built upon them scale up and down well;
- They demonstrate openness, which is important for public sector bodies generally but particularly at the moment.
The risks are:
- People misunderstand costs. OSS is not ‘free’. There’s still hardware, implementation, migration and content generation and management. These dwarf the cost of licensing, which is a small part of total cost of ownership.
- You are still ‘locked in’. Moving from one system to another is difficult, time consuming and expensive. It is also not easy to reuse modules developed for Plone, say, in Drupal as the underlying architecture is so different.
- Mismatched scale. OSS vendors are smaller and therefore higher risk for public sector managers. They also cannot absorb sales costs of £20K into future licensing revenue. Graham asserted that public sector procurement (e.g. OJEU) is ‘broken’ and is biased against open source vendors.
- Unreasoned decisions i.e. you get Sharepoint for ‘free’ in a Microsoft package but the cost of implementing and servicing it outstrips any ‘savings’.
In conclusion:
- Not all OSS is the same. Variable quality and capabilities;
- Don’t underestimate the cost of OSS;
- The team, not the tech, creates success;
- No better or worse than proprietary software. Look for the best tool for the job.
- OSS aligns well to evolutionary delivery e.g. ‘try before buy’, agile development. This is best practice for software development anyway
- Public sector procurement is broken.
- OSS aligns well with current public sector drivers to reduce costs (lower up-front costs), engage stakeholders (OSS underpins most social media) and to be innovative and agile (supports low cost experimentation)
Really useful session I felt. Still wouldn’t mind finding out more about Plone though!
Changes to JISC website – phase 1
All been very quiet on the blogging front for a while. That’s because we’ve had our noses to the grindstone doing this…
We’ve made some changes to the JISC website that went live today. This is an evolution of the existing site, not a massive revamp, and is phase 1 of a series of changes we are planning over the coming months.
First, you will notice a somewhat redesigned home page with a centrepiece ‘hero slot’ carousel (good old jQuery), highlighting the latest/best/most interesting/most notable offerings from JISC at the moment. Apologies to users of the previous ‘customise your homepage’ feature – this has been removed owing to low take up and poor user testing results. The topic cloud has also disappeared (it wasn’t a proper tag cloud or a good topic list) and now appears in the footer of every page, which we hope is more usable and useful.
There are two new sections on the website; Supporting Your Institution and a Blog.
The Supporting Your Institution section is aimed at senior managers in institutions with responsibility for strategy (though it of course not exclusive and we hope it will interest other users). We have attempted to identify some of the principal issues faced by institutions and provided strategic ‘cribsheets’ that give support and advice and link through to JISC resources that can help.
We used Disqus to provide the commenting feature on the cribsheets. Obviously haven’t used it ‘in anger’ yet but it seems a well featured and usable product.
We have also introduced a JISC blog. This is hardly revolutionary and individual JISC staff have been active bloggers for years, but it became apparent during the user research that informed these developments that a corporate-level blog would be a valuable addition to the website . JISC’s work is so wide and deep, it can be difficult for those not familiar or regularly involved with the organisation to get a sense of the whole. We hope the blog will address this by providing a narrative on what we do and think, stimulate discussion and provide access points for those who want to explore further.
The blog runs on WordPress. No other contender really. I am pleased though with how it looks so seamlessly integrated with the rest of the site, given there has been no backend integration between WordPress and our website CMS, Sitecore. The chaps at Eduserv have done a very good job on this.
As I said, this is a multi-phase project and this is phase 1. If you want a sneaky peek at how it will look when it’s all finished, there is a prototype.
These changes are the outcomes from the user evaluation and needs projects we have run over the last year. Thanks to all those who took part.
As ever, your feedback very welcome. Please leave below, email it to web@jisc.ac.uk or tag it #jiscweb so we can find it.
And do let us know if you spot any bugs.