We have reached an exciting new milestone in our plans to transform UCL’s website and content management system.
The Ioe has become the first website site to migrate to our new upgraded system with a brand-new design and improved information architecture.
Thanks to a cleaner, clearer and more contemporary design, visitors and users of the website will be more easily able to navigate UCL and find content they need without friction (from computers to iPads and mobile phones). Meanwhile, our hard-working staff who create content will have a better editor experience - saving them time and frustration through much easier editing processes.
The Ioe faculty website is now live!
Using our website to reflect UCL’s world-leading excellence
Our website is our digital face out to the rest of the world and is often the first place audiences land when they are curious to find out who we are and what we are about, or when they want to find information easily. It is essential then, that our external face should reflect the world-leading excellence of the research, teaching and experience inside UCL.
The Ioe website upgrade is the first milestone in a major digital experience project to migrate our entire digital estate to a new content management system over the coming months with modern, accessible designs. This is an important part of our wider strategic ambitions to refresh our brand and raise our profile.
A reminder of what has changed
How we’re improving the digital experience for our community
The Digital Experience team has been working with our Drupal partner, Zoocha, and colleagues in Ioe and across UCL over the past 18 months to get to this exciting stage and we thank everyone from the UCL community who has provided input to
Next up, we’ll take the learnings from this part of the project, and work through the running order for key top-level central sections and pages in December and then focus on the next two pilot faculties, the Bartlett and Medical Sciences.
Following this Ioe pilot migration we’ll be able to flesh out the details of migration tasks and assess the effort and support required from faculty teams, and we’ll share the detailed timeline soon. This will also include key sites like the prospectus, and what the changes will mean for the design system, and our enhanced ability to support the changes in brand direction coming later next year.
Collaborative working
Getting to this stage has been the collective effort of Product Owners, Clare Kennedy and Andy Marriott, the content design team led by Alex Talbot, ably assisted by David O’Driscoll and working closely with our brilliant support colleagues, Eulalia Carvalho and Caitlin O’Connor. Key to having a site to work with was Head of Experience Design Vincent Harding, and our talented dev and test colleagues led by Marino Buccolini. The team also worked very closely with Ben Watson, Head of Digital Accessibility and his team, to ensure we are in a position to deliver the most accessible sites possible, for UCL.
Being the first site to go live is no easy feat, and the Ioe team have been exceptional. Huge thanks go to Razwana Quadir, Jason Ilagan, Anna Boccassini, Anna Jin, Gabrielle Fadullon, and Sarah-Jane Gregori who have pulled out all the stops to get their site live and working exactly how they want.
In that Agile way, we’ve gone live with something that we know we want to iterate, so we’re keen for our community to feedback on their experience using the site. We’ll adapt and develop as we move through each site, so please do let us know if you spot anything.
Supporting you with Drupal
You can use the General Feedback form on MyServices.
For all’other support queries, continue to use the Drupal forms on MyServices.
Drupal Site Owner meeting - Wednesday 27 November
We will be sharing our learnings with the Drupal Site Owner community in our next meeting on 27 November, including:
- Migration preparation and go-live tasks including information architecture and redirect strategy
- Onboarding and training
- MyServices and how to reach the DX team
- University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT (0) 20 7679 2000
