UCL Estates website project management
Old UCL Estates website built in Dreamweaver.
The old UCL Estates website is built in a desktop content management system called Dreamweaver. The site had very limited functionality and limited ability to update it with only one person within the UCL Estates team having access.
The age of the website meant it was ‘unstable’ with disintegrating html coding due to its age and obsolete platform.
At the same time UCL was in the middle of a four year programme to move all their websites to a new standardised Drupal platform.
Alex Perry, the Senior Communications Manager for UCL Estates commissioned That Web Person to re-build the site. The project included:
scoping phase
website brief
user research
content writing and population (building of pages)
Drupal training
Google Analytics dashboard setting
Scoping phase
There were over 1000 pages and 1000 pdfs on the site which were all reviewed. The value of the content was assessed through conversations with the teams, Google Analytics data, social media conversations and a competitor analysis.
Website brief
The outcome was a succinct website development brief containing recommendations on what the new website (using the UCL template) would look like and who will be involved in the steps to build it and how we would measure it’s success.
User research
The main audiences for the website were (internal) Estates staff and project contractors who needed to access a range of building policies and procedures and (external) service users (UCL Staff) who needed access to Estate services such as maintenance requests for building faults.
UCL Estates user research report pietree result.
A initial navigational structure was drafted and tested with both these audiences using face-to-face interviews and an online Tree Jack test from Optimal Workshop. (Great tool, do check it out!).
The results formed the basis of the new site structure and content.
Content writing and population
With a solid understanding of the website goals, the users and now the content, I was then able to start building the pages using the UCL Drupal template. The focus was to ensure users could easily find the information they needed, so a series of landing pages with images was created to guide people to the more detailed content pages.
A policies and procedures tagged listing was created to help users easily find their documents.
The content was condensed with better use of headings, bullets and call-to-action buttons to make it clearer what steps the user needed to take.
Drupal training
I delivered six bespoke training sessions to each of the teams based on the information they would need to maintain on an ongoing basis.
This was accompanied by a detailed training manual.
Google Analytics
In order to assess the effectiveness of the new site a personalised Google Analytics dashboard was set up to report monthly on key metrics such as the top pages visited, where users were coming from, search terms used and devices viewed on.
“I chose Reena for our website project as she had the right balance of skills - client management, working with developers and Drupal experience.
She didn’t disappoint. She worked amazingly well across our large, complex, busy division. She met with each team to understand their needs and manage expectations. She fitted in seamlessly, worked hard, problem solved and got us through some challenges to deliver a brilliant site - on time and on budget.
She is great to work with and achieved an excellent look and feel within the parameters of a fixed site.
I am delighted with our website and Reena’s work.”
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