The New Web Estate project

New Web Estate project overview

• Video transcript

  Rachel Levett speaking:

  Dana, are you happy to share the slides again? That's like before. Oh, fantastic. Thank you. Lovely. Thanks.

  Good morning everyone. It's really nice to see you all. Thank you for joining us early on a Monday morning. We've all had a coffee or tea. This is an hour-long webinar to introduce you to our new content model and content strategy, which is a core part of the new web estate project. Hopefully, you've heard a little bit about this project. This is what we're working on to deliver a new website and a new intranet for Sussex.

  I'm Rachel Levett, for those of you who I haven't met. I'm the associate director of digital and creative media and also the senior responsible officer for the new website project. I'm really delighted to be joined today by Dana Rock from PickleJar Communications, who is an expert partner, content agency that we've been working with over several months now to help us develop this stage of the project, which is absolutely critical. Also in the room, we've got Adrian Imms, our head of digital content, who is also critical on the project team. Many other colleagues as well, Jane from Change Management, and we've got change comms colleagues here too, I think.

  That should be lots of people to dive in and answer any questions that you might have. If we could ask you just to park them to remember and pop them to the end, that would be fantastic just for flow purposes, but feel free to put anything in the chat as well, and we can come to that if we've got time. I think that is everything I was going to say about housekeeping.

  So, Dana, would you mind moving to the next slide? Thank you. I'm just going to speak very briefly to give a quick introduction before Dana takes the reins and walks us through the content strategy and the content model itself, which is probably what you're all waiting to hear about. I just wanted to make sure that we're all on the same page around the project. I'm not going to speak for a long time about why we're doing the project, because I think the reasons are quite widely known by now, and I think probably everybody in this room is quite behind it. Really, just to say that obviously we are building a new website and intranet because we have to, essentially. Our current website is no longer fit for purpose for what we need it to do for us. It's worth saying that several previous attempts have been made—really valiant attempts by lots of members of the team.

  So predating my arrival, a few people have been asking what's different about this time and why is this one going to succeed? I think there are three key differences that we hope will lend themselves to success.

  The first one is money. We are in a really difficult budgetary period and economic climate. We are all well aware of that. This particular project is very lucky to have benefited from ringfenced budgets and real university investment that this is something that needs to happen. The second is a real widespread recognition that this is quite a complex change project. We'll go on to talk a little bit more about that. It's not just a website design and development project, which would be straightforward, but really it's about getting to the heart of what the current website is and what sits behind it and leading people through change.

  I think we are very lucky to have had widespread senior-level support as well. From the university executive, everyone is very behind the fact that this is something that we have to do now. Everyone here knows we need the website to work really hard for us. It's a key student recruitment tool, a key student retention and experience tool, and a key tool to help us generate research income. At the moment, it's falling short of doing any of those as well as it needs to for us.

  On that note, it's also not a silver bullet. I'm sure every project lead would say this, but it's not going to be the thing that pulls us out of all our current challenges. It's certainly going to be a key part of that, but it can't do that on its own. It is part and parcel of lots of different interventions and things that the university is looking at. The current web estate we have and the way it's built and managed really leaves us susceptible to many risks—cyber risks, reputational risks, legal risks, and importantly, user experience risks.

  We all know that the site itself, due to many reasons, isn't able to keep up with the changing demands and experiences that our key audiences expect. We also talk about the behind-the-site situation being a bit like the Wild West. We have well over 600 different editors of the website spread across the university, and we don't have a clear operating model for the website. We don't have a crystal clear vision for what we want to use the website for and crucially, for what our users want and need from us.

  A lot of our content is based on internal structures and perceptions rather than really pivoting to what our users want or need. That's the big piece around the operating model. I think I'll stop there. Dana, if you don't mind moving to the next slide. Thank you.

  This is just a high-level slide of what we want and need to achieve and how we will go about doing that. As we said, we want a modern, engaging site and intranet that really lifts Sussex up, presents our brand and strategy in a way that appeals to those key audiences, and delivers a really useful, engaging experience to them. That is completely pointless if we don't have the model behind it that enables us to connect the right content with the right people at the right time and helps us deliver that brilliant experience for them.

  The next part is obviously fundamental. We've talked about this being a big change piece. We need to be clear on the structures, bounds, and foundations that sit behind the whole website piece, enabling the content model to come to life, which then delivers the brilliant website we're all looking for.

  So that's the high-level piece about the operating model. If you don't mind moving on, thank you. I don't know how well you can see this, but we can circulate these slides afterward if people would like that. This summarizes the limitations of our operating model or lack thereof now. All of this interesting insight and data was collected from you guys—colleagues across the university last summer. We worked with people and did a big consultation piece to find out where we are now.

  We did lots of different interviews, workshops, and surveys with website editors and content owners. What we found was quite telling. Over half of the people that published content to the website said they rely on nothing to inform the content that they put out there. They were given lots of options like user insights or a content strategy, and over half selected actually nothing. We also found that over two-thirds of those website editors had had no training in the last few years or never had any training.

  What this showed us was that a lot of our website content is largely managed by subject matter experts, not necessarily web or content digital professionals. What we need to do through this and that foundations piece is ensure there is a clear and better role for all of those different people that need to be involved in content production.

  Next slide, please, Dana. I'm nearly there. This is the vision and what we are all working to achieve. Hopefully, it's fairly obvious and straightforward. We've talked about the brilliant experience we want to give our users, which is informed by robust audience research, something we've been developing alongside PickleJar.

  We need to ensure that content planning and production is recognized within the university as an expert process and that it's led and managed by a well-resourced team able to support all those involved in content production. We need the tech to be robust, agile, and able to develop over time to meet evolving user needs.

  Then we need to look at the governance piece. So what are those different roles? What are the different structures? How can all those involved in content production be clear about where they fit in the new world? There will be changes to ways of working. I just want to say that this webinar isn't going to be the place where we talk about that. This will focus on the content strategy and the content model, which Dana is going to talk about. The governance piece will come further down the line. So, although it's tempting to ask questions about it, if we can really focus on the strategy and the model, that would be brilliant.

  I hope that's a useful summary. I hope that gets us all on the same page. I'm going to hand over to Dana now, who's the expert who's going to talk us through the model and stuff.

  Dana Rock speaking:

  Thanks very much. Hopefully that's provided you with a good background in terms of the rationale and the vision of things. What I'm going to talk about in the next pieces is what I think will look different in terms of this connected content model approach and the content substance strategy. We have done some work doing an audit of your existing content and your existing website, so I can share some of the findings that give a bit more background on where things are and where they need to be. As Rachel articulated, we really need to make sure that the web content is doing the work it needs to do to be a strategic tool to support things like research and recruiting students. We'll also touch briefly on the ways of working that we might think about as well.

  Now, I have seen someone's put a message in the chat around what is a headless CMS. This is where we'll talk about the problem and what this different approach to content looks like. The metaphor we're going to use is the problem of one solid plastic dinosaur. If you think of the existing website, it's a bit of a kind of a monolith. If you have a website where you're kind of that in the textbook, you can think of it as a kind of whizzy week. What you see is what you get. It's the kind of acronym where you're typing in content and as you see it in the editor, that is how it's spaced on the page. We've got our website constructed around pages.

  Now, that works because it's evolved historically from having pages in books, but now we're talking about websites. There's actually a different approach. The plastic dinosaur metaphor is really thinking about the website as it is now, the traditional website. It's just created; it's kind of one blob. If you want to change, let's say you had a rebrand and you were going to become a pink university, there'd be loads of places where you're going to need to change stuff. Or if you're changing the name of something, you've got to change it in all these different places because it's just created as one blob. Imagine writing a page; if you want to change one word, you've got to retype that whole page. That's a bit like what you've got with the website now, and what you could have, looking at it with the opportunity here for Sussex, is a more modular approach—a modular dinosaur made out of pieces of Lego. If you imagine all the little pieces of content you've got on your website as blocks of Lego, you can change one piece, you can slot it in, you can slot it out.

  The technology that you can use behind that is called a headless CMS. It's a different approach in the backend. If your website is structured around a kind of route structure or branching structure, that you get from trees, you've got different levels and different pages. That's the traditional approach. A headless CMS is a different way of doing it, where you're thinking about content in terms of these different blocks, which has loads of advantages. First of all, what this means in practice: imagine you've got a content element, something really small, like someone's name and someone's job title. Now that's going to appear in multiple different places across your website. That person is going to have a staff profile page. They may also be part of a research group or teach in a particular course. There might be loads of different places in which that appears, and they've got a little profile that's related to those different roles that they play.

  If that person's name changes or that person's job title changes, you've got the job to find all the instances on the website and update it in all those separate places. But this modular approach would think about that content as almost a bit of data, right? You update it once, and then it will automatically update all the places where it appears. You can see that would be really beneficial in avoiding problems with things like details being out of date, phone numbers being out of date, contact details—all that sort of stuff.

  So it's this modular approach that we're looking at, and that's what we're talking about when we mention connected content, thinking about the information that you've got on your new website as these little Lego bricks that can be built and repurposed in different ways to create different pages, but in a way that you can update more easily. There are loads of benefits to this. It enables content to be separated from presentation. If you want to make visual changes, it's separate from updating that information because you're almost treating it like a kind of database that's feeding that information. Of course, it's doing things like avoiding duplication, reducing errors, and improving efficiency.

  It also has some benefits that might not be immediately obvious to you but improve things like making your website more intelligible to machines, so you're more likely to appear well in search engines and can help future-proof things. You probably have heard of things like how voice search is becoming more common. If you create your content in the right way, you'll improve the opportunities for your Sussex content to appear in voice search. There are also opportunities for improving personalization. Thinking about these little Lego blocks, you could say, "Okay, if you're a member of staff, you see this version of the content. If you're a student, you see this version of the content," or something like that. You can personalize and improve user experience in a way that's more flexible than the traditional approach.

  And of course, there are great benefits in terms of sustainability, which I know is a really important concern for Sussex and should be for all of us. Reducing that duplication of effort improves things, as well as considering the digital footprint of your web estate. There are some opportunities there. So there are lots of benefits to this approach. The first step in bringing this to life is to start with this piece of work, which is content modeling, something that PickleJar has been working with colleagues in Sussex to help do. We've started to understand the types of content, what those elements are—those Lego bricks. We've begun defining these top-level content types, like event listings, person profiles, course pages, research groups, guidance, and all these sorts of things.

  Now, this is not an exhaustive list of everything that you'll find on the Sussex website, but these are the big categories. If you group together the content that fits a lot of these, you're really getting to win. If we can get some of these types of content and think about how we can model them like the pieces of Lego, then we'll really improve efficiency, performance, and user experience on Sussex web pages.

  What we've done then is work with various subject matter experts to understand what the elements are in each of these things—what they're made up of—so that we can begin to map the content model. This is possibly too small for you to see just on the screen now, but as Rachel said, I think the slides will be available afterwards. This is an example where, if we look at a staff profile, we consider the different elements that it's actually made of and how it could be displayed differently if, for example, it were an academic staff profile versus a non-academic staff profile. Then we think about how we can feed that data differently so that, as in the previous example, if someone's name or job title changes, you change it once in a system, and it displays everywhere without having to chase around the web and risk things being out of date.

  So at the top level, we've identified what those core types are, and we've begun to understand what those elements are—what those Lego bricks are—so that we think about content not in terms of pages but in terms of Lego bricks or pieces of data. That's really crucial because it ensures that the facts are accurate and gives us the flexibility to design and redesign to best meet our users' or audiences' needs.

  That brings me nicely to the bit that I'm going to call the content substance strategy. As Rachel said at the beginning, your website is a really important tool to support things like student recruitment, student experience, research, and all those sorts of things. We've done quite a lot of research to really understand the audiences that you have and what their needs are. The substance framework defines what the top-level purpose of the content should be and how your content can best meet those needs and help meet your organizational goals.

  The audiences we've defined include prospective students, current students, staff, alumni, community, and research audiences. We looked at their core needs. For example, a prospective student's core need might be understanding the actual requirements for a course, but we also explored related things—things they didn't know they needed that could be really helpful. This could connect with that wider purpose of engaging potential students and improving Sussex's reputation.

  Now, as a mental framework behind all of this, the content substance framework offers an opportunity to think about how you approach your content. The traditional approach to creating content often starts with what we want to say and where we want to say it, then just pushes it out to different audiences. The approach we're taking here begins with what matters to the audience, what they are looking for, and then considers what content would be useful to them and how this is relevant to the University of Sussex.

  So it's really this kind of user-led, audience-led approach, really understanding the insights we have about our audiences so we can create the right content at the right time to best meet their needs. That, I think, really speaks to the problem that Rachel mentioned earlier, where a lot of content creators are creating content without any guidance. The insights about your audiences can be that guiding light to help you decide what you publish and how you publish it.

  So in this content substance strategy, we've defined three broad areas of what your content needs to do: provide, engage, and inspire.

  There's a lot of content where you need to provide information in the best way to meet users' needs. For example, someone might just want to find directions because they are coming to visit next week or find the entry requirements for a course.

  Then there's engaging content, where we might need to engage audiences and demonstrate how it meets their needs. They might not know they are looking for something, but when they find it, it can be really helpful. For instance, a student might know they need their exam timetable but also discover support services or revision tips that help them succeed.

  Inspiring content is about promoting and engaging with new audience members around topics that relate to them. This could be for community audiences, research audiences, or any audience where you want to attract people to Sussex.

  We did a lot of audience research, including surveys and interviews, to understand these needs better. We created detailed lists of what those top tasks were and what content would engage them. For example, the current students' research provided insights into what content you need to publish on the web to work strategically and meet your strategic goals.

  We also used the findings from this research to conduct a content audit. This extensive piece of work involved reviewing over 500 user needs across six audiences. We analyzed the University of Sussex web pages, acting as those audiences looking for specific information. We identified where the content was good, needed work, or was missing or duplicated.

  The top-level finding was that, out of six pages on your website, two were good, two needed a bit of work, one was concerning, and one was either missing or duplicated. This indicates a significant opportunity to improve the web content.

  We also found that current student content is mostly good, with some excellent examples. However, the research audience was potentially the least well-served, as much of that content was concerning.

  There were also issues with poorly designed content, disjointed user journeys, duplicate or overlapping content, and key information being hard to access. These are all areas where there's an opportunity to improve content to best meet user needs.

  Now, as for how the connected content approach might change ways of working, there are two main considerations. The first is a user-focused approach—understanding audience needs is crucial for guiding content creation. The second is adopting a connected content model, which offers numerous opportunities to enhance user experience and improve sustainability.

  This requires a shift in thinking, moving from traditional page-focused content creation to a model where content is viewed as modular blocks.

  Key points to consider for implementation include agreeing on a content strategy proposition—what gets published and why—rather than posting content without a clear rationale. It's essential to align with user needs and strategic goals.

  Maintaining and evolving the overarching content architecture will also require effort. For instance, your course pages already follow a structured template, which simplifies updates and ensures compliance.

  Subject matter experts will need to shift from thinking about creating pages to owning specific pieces of content, like facts about a course or research group.

  Hopefully, this gives you a good overview of the connected content model, the substance strategy, and what it might mean for ways of working.

  Rachel, I’ll hand it back to you now.