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).