It’s been a while since we last posted on this blog. (Just shows the work involved in content creation, I guess…)

Since our last post, the project previously mentioned has been given a snappy name: the New Web Estate project. It broadly has the scope of covering our website, a staff intranet and the supporting systems and processes needed to make this work.

We spent the rest of 2023 pulling together a project mandate, which enabled us to take on a couple of new, fixed-term people in the digital team to help us keep going with business-as-usual while sizing up the task at hand.

After getting sign-off on the mandate, we’ve spent 2024 so far building a business case.

This has involved several strands of work, including:

• gathering audience insights
• developing a new approach to managing content
• engaging senior people from across the university in our work
• understanding how a new CMS would support a connected content model.

We’ll cover all these individually in future posts.

We’re shortly to look at a provisional new structure for the website – known as information architecture – and explore the beginnings of a content strategy.

To help us, we’ve brought an agency on board for this phase – more to follow on that in another post.

All of this will help us to build a business case that will go to the leadership of the university later this year.

After that, all being well, the real building will begin.