myNewport - Bespoke Higher Education .NET Intranet & CMS

This year Newport’s Web Team have developed a bespoke internal portal (written in .NET), with targeted content and views for students and staff.  myNewport will replace the existing staff intranet and student mLE (My Learning Essentials), and will be launched before the start of the new academic year.  Learning and teaching material will be held on Moodle 2.0, which will be linked through from myNewport.

It was designed and built from scratch in house by the Web Team, specifically for this purpose.  The CMS (content management system) for myNewport was created for an easy transition for existing users, and it also simplified many standard processes.  Content can be tagged for staff, students, both or private, making it a very powerful and innovative system for higher education.  myNewport has been designed around improving internal communications through targeted internal news, videos and improved delivery of content.

Below is an example of the myNewport homepage, and an example of what a page in the CMS will look like:

Homepage Design:

CMS Design:

myNewport

We have been extremely busy here at Web Team towers in Caerleon.  The team has designed and developed a bespoke .NET intranet system and CMS with a staff and student view; content can be tagged as staff only, student only or both.  The system has been designed around improving internal communications through targeted internal news, videos and improved delivery of content.

We are in the initial stages of testing and the system will be launched for the start of term in September.

Newport's Website Re-Design

A year on we thought it was about time to take a look back at our re-design of Newport University's website.  Newport’s re-designed corporate website (www.newport.ac.uk) was launched late 2010.  The old site suffered from information overload with a mass of links and banners across the homepage.  It had grown so large that it became difficult to manage and content needed to be refreshed and improved.  The challenge was to re-design the website, while promoting key corporate messages and improving the user experience, resulting in increased student applications, business engagement and alumni membership.

The old website:

It was decided that the new design should be bold and simplistic, with a focus on incorporating innovative multimedia, especially video and visually captivating photography.  Several key points of entry to the site were designed into the homepage; the large rotating banner directing to very important content, the three student recruitment focused boxes underneath the banner and finally featured news and events.  The standard footer, consistent across the site, links to our multimedia channel (including video and audio) and to our social media channels.  The top level navigation uses drop down menus to reduce the time it takes for the user to find the information they are looking for.

The new website:

One year on and the robust design is still as effective as the day we launched.  We are constantly improving it and we are working on making it more mobile friendly.

Video for Web: The Basics

Making a successful web video to promote your business, brand, event or service isn’t an easy task. The ‘surfing’ culture of the Internet means that if your video doesn’t appeal to the viewer within the first few seconds then they will quickly move on. Here are a few basic tips to engage your viewers and improve the quality of your video.  This article is aimed at new web video producers with a fairly low budget.

Basic Tips

When shooting on consumer equipment there are a few basic rules to keep in mind. Use a tripod whenever possible to keep the shot still, use headphones to listen to the audio you are filming, set your scene in a well lit area, watch back important scenes on location just in case you need to shoot them again, and finally edit your clips and keep them tight.

The Message

Ensure that you have a clear message for the video, and take the time to plan the video around the message. Using storyboards, scripts, shot and location lists will always improve the overall quality of the content and make it clear what you are trying to achieve.

Length

When producing digital media for web you have to think bite-size. People simply won’t sit and watch a 10 minute video unless it is REALLY interesting to them. On average my web videos are around two minutes in length, and I make sure that the message is clear from the beginning. The shorter the better!

Equipment

These days we are spoilt for choice when it comes to cameras and tech. You can film good quality shots on your digital camera, DSLR or handheld consumer camcorder. Use a tripod where possible, consumer cameras can often produce shaky shots. If you are interviewing someone, use an external microphone with your camera, it will produce a much better sound. Use headphones to listen as you are filming.

Sound

We are all used to watching Internet video and we don’t usually expect perfect picture quality. But, if the sound is inaudible, then the viewer will instantly move on. It is vital to get good clear audio when shooting interviews, speeches, presentations etc. As mentioned above, using headphones to monitor the audio as you are recording is essential. It will help you judge the background noise and if a better location is needed.

Whilst interviewing someone, make sure the interviewee is close to the camera when using an onboard microphone, or close to the mic if it’s external. It sounds obvious but many videos are inaudible because the subject is too far away from the microphone.

Editing

Editing your footage is very important to get a more professional finish to your video. Tightly edit your clips – cut out any pauses at the beginning and end of the clip. There is lots of consumer editing software out there like Windows Movie Maker or iMovie to get you started, or to really get stuck in have a look at the professional packages such as Apple’s Final Cut Pro (Mac) and Adobe Premiere Pro. Export in a high quality format like H.264 MP4 and upload to YouTube or Vimeo.

PRINCE 2 and the Web Team

PRINCE 2 is a project management methodology and stands for Projects IN Controlled Environments, which sounds quite complicated, and in part in can be!  In this post I’m going to talk about how it is benefiting the web team, and also about how it’s not too tough to utilise thanks to the tailoring aspect of the methodology.

The web team attended a three day training course run by the Knowledge Academy which was held in Cardiff Bay, the three days were quite intense, there was so much to learn packed into each day, plus several hours of homework to do each night. On the third day there is an exam for the PRINCE 2 foundation course in which luckily we all passed :), some of our fellow learners were doing the five day practitioner course which has two extra days and another exam.

PRINCE 2 is basically a framework for managing projects, it was originally developed from an IT background and is now identified as a best practice by the UK Government and widely used in both the public and private sector.

Going through the framework you quickly identify things that you already do when running web development projects, things like Change Control,  keeping a daily log, and lots of other common sense practices. PRINCE 2 gives you a full and rich framework for managing a project, and importantly the processes and controls to manage change. How often do web professionals get caught by feature creep, never ending additional request for new features or change to spec? Normally you can expect a fair amount of this, so PRINCE2 gives you the weapons to handle these with concepts like Scope and Configuration Management.

Some of the advantages that really stood out for me were :

- The methodology gives you a well defined common language set that can be used when discussing projects, if you talk to someone else on a project who has done PRINCE2 whether it’s an external supplier or someone in your organisation they will know what you are referring to and understand the context and implications.

- In PRINCE2 responsibilities and roles within the project are well defined and understood. You can avoid having large working groups or committees where the purpose and roles within it are not clear.

- Most meetings only occur when required at stages in the project when decisions are to be made, rather organising them periodically  when there may be nothing to discuss.

- PRINCE2 puts an emphasis on Business Case and ongoing business Justification, these are defined and monitored through the project, and can help avoid project continuing for the sake of it. PRINCE2 asserts that it’s valid for a project to close if the business case no longer holds up. If people involved in the project have to define formally what the project is to deliver and the benefits to the business, it’s much easier for those producing the solutions to deliver something that meets expectations and for everyone to measure the project’s success.

PRINCE2 consists of Principles, Themes, Processes and tailoring. I won’t go into details but I think it’s worth mentioning the Seven Principles of PRINCE2 to give you a taste of what it can offer. They are :

- Continued Business Justification
- Learn from experience
- Defined roles  and responsibilities
- Manage by stages
- Manage by exception
- Focus on products
- Tailor to suit the project environment

Lastly I’d just like to mention Tailoring which is a big part of PRINCE2. Going through the course and covering all aspects of the framework you will undoubtedly come across parts that will be too in depth or not required for most projects you might be running. PRINCE2 allows you to tailor how you implement the framework to suit the scale and formality you require. Some parts of  PRINCE2 have to be used otherwise the project cannot be said to be running under PRINCE2 but other parts can be made less formal or dropped altogether.  If you are working in Higher Education JISC have developed a version of PRINCE2 that may suit you. This was the basis (with some tweaks) to how our web team project manage large web development tasks.

JISC Infonet

PRINCE Official Website


Good luck,

Joss

Introducing Newport's Web Team

Hello and welcome to our brand new blog.  We are the Web Team at Newport University (South Wales) and this is our blog keeping you up-to-date with everything we do.
It's the first working day of 2012 and we have been planning to do this for most of 2011 so here goes...

We are a small but perfectly formed team creating and managing the University's website, intranet, mobile apps and multimedia.  We combine both technical and creative skills to promote our University and higher education through the web and digital domains.

Our corporate website is running Sharepoint, we are in the process of re-designing our Intranet / Student portal and we have developed apps for Android and iPhone (Newport Uni / Newport Slang Translator).

The team consists of four core members plus an office guest from 3VTV.

Joss Ingram - Web Development Manager
Jonathan Clark - Web Administrator
Stephen Cleary - Web Multimedia Developer
Bharani Jayasuri - Web Developer

and Scott Mellors - Software Developer (for soon to be launching online TV channel 3VTV)

This is the first of many posts.  We hope to inspire and share information with you and our web colleagues in higher education.

All the best,

Stephen