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User Testing release of NDARC website

Posted by on August 4th, 2011 · Medicine Website Refresh

We have just released into user testing (internal release) the NDARC website.

NDARC UAT Website

This is the pilot project for the rest of the Faculty to test our new server systems and linkages with other UNSW websites. It will also help us (and NDARC) test the types of content that we/they want to release.

This morning I gave a presentation to NDARC to tell them about the release and what will be involved before we go live at the end of the month.

We are sharing these slides for wider distribution and continuing to work on improvements to the website.

PDF version of Web Update Aug 2011

Web Update Aug 2011 (.quicktime mov)

The new platform runs on Drupal 7 and in the background we are trying to keep all the Faculty sites linked with each other and with other UNSW systems… primarily the Research Gateway

We will soon be looking at adding other sites into the platform.

Page Mockups March 2011 versions

Posted by on March 3rd, 2011 · Medicine Website Refresh

The pilot site for the Medicine Web Refresh is NDARC (National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre). We have been working with NDARC and a design company in Sydney to think through how the new website should work and … what it should look like.

I am including the March 2011 Page Mockups as a PDF so you can have them as a pack to show people. Please consider this a work in progress. It is the intelectual property of UNSW and we retain all rights.

The initial release for NDARC will have the following basic page types:

  • Home
  • About Us
  • News and Events
  • People
  • Projects
  • Resources
  • Search Results
  • Staff Details
  • Project Details

The reason we are focusing on these pages is because they will be the main database-driven pages.  As we look at other sites in the Faculty we may need to add a few page types.

An early look at the module list

Posted by on March 3rd, 2011 · Medicine Website Refresh

One of the promises I made during the website update earlier this week was to provide a list of the modules that will be included in the release of the NDARC website. I am still working on the detailed version of that list but I am posting the current list of module titles for people to have a look at.

[Read more →]

Goals: A spotlight on People and Projects

Posted by on March 3rd, 2011 · Medicine Website Refresh

As I outlined  in the presentation this week, one of the goals of the Website refresh is to put a much stronger spotlight on our people and projects. This is the biggest new feature of the Faculty website refresh and should complement some of the very good work done by the Research Gateway website which is planned for release in April this year.

A spotlight on People

Some of the reasons why we think this spotlight on people and project is important include:

  • Having more information on people and projects increases the “surface area” of the website dramatically.  We hope to get more visits to our websites as we expose more relevant content.
  • We want to promote our superstars and make it easy for others to talk about us online. People need to be able to link to good content when they are talking about us online. We also want to make it easier for people to cite our publications when they are reading about our People and Projects.
  • We want to be able to expose work-in progress and give people a chance to talk about what they are currently doing, either through their personal profile or by updating project information. We want to promote user-generated content on our websites and also to make it easy to bring in information if it is being posted in other websites.

We like having people on the home page because we think a home page can be like the foyer of our buildings where we sometimes see our staff walking past. Last night you might have seen Emma on the news and when you come into our building you might see Emma walking past on her way to a meeting.

This module on the home page can be used to promote some people or projects (or groups) onto the front page of the website (and perhaps also onto our digital signage system).

Using Research Gateway profiles in Medicine Websites

Posted by on March 2nd, 2011 · Medicine Website Refresh

One of the key aspects of the new Medicine Website Refresh is to leverage off the people and project profiles used in the UNSW research gateway.

What I am trying to show in the drawing below is that we expect Academic staff to go to the Research Gateway and update most of their profile in that website.. content will flow down to the Medicine Websites (no promises yet on how fast it will flow). HR data will be updated directly with HR and publications will be managed via ResPubs.

We also expect that a few extra local fields (we are calling these Medicine+ fields) like our ILP information may be added to the profile. Currently this is being added inside Medicine.. And these fields will need to updated from within the Medicine Websites.

This may be a little confusing to users.

Using research gateway profiles in Medicine website

The other thing I am trying to show here is that the profile will work across ALL the medicine websites. So a staff member in NDARC will also have their profile in the Faculty website. Where you are shown will depend on how the profile is categorised/tagged.

We hope that the above model will make sense for people and projects.

Medicine Web Refresh Update Meeting Slides

Posted by on March 1st, 2011 · Medicine Website Refresh

As promised, here are our Slides from the update meeting held today.

For those who missed out, we discussed the project background and the current status of the project.

As you have probably already noticed I have broken up the presentation into a number of  separate posts in case people want to comment on specific aspects of the presentation.