Standardising content assets for sustainable use

Recently, we received a support request to include the logo for a new Athena Swan bronze awardee. Attached to the ticket was an image file of the logo, which I’ve seen before, uploaded to many areas of the media library. I decided to take a closer look at all relevant school pages…

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The case against ‘just in case’ content

‘Just in case’ content is created or duplicated online, ‘just in case’ users might need it. Alex Saint, from the Current Students content team at the University, explains why sometimes less is more.

Do your webpages have too much copy for their own good?

The ultimate goal for University webpages is that users can quickly and easily find the information they are looking for.

Yet one of the biggest challenges the Current Students content team faces is unnecessary and duplicate content – a historical issue at the University. Here’s why we might suggest removing content from your pages.

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Easy improvements for users of the Students’ Health Service

How we combined data and knowledge to make a category page work better for users. 

A category page (sometimes called ‘section homepage’ or just ‘homepage’ here at the University) fulfils many functions on a website. It showcases the service, is usually the most visited page, and is the one page above all others that senior staff want a say in shaping.  

The real purpose of this page is often lost in the ‘make it look dynamic!’ hype. As all good content designers know, websites exist to give our users what they need, and the number one place to do this is the service category page. And yet at the University we often find category pages are plagued with issues such as: 

  • the content our users want is hard to find or missing altogether.
  • content loses focus because of ad hoc changes over time. 

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Optimising the user experience of our Clearing pages

A-level results day is one of the most important days in the University calendar, and that applies to us in the digital team. One of the most important tasks for us is ensuring that any A-level students who enter clearing have all the information they need from our website to make a decision about whether (or not) they’d like to join us.
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Untangling our duplicate content

Senior digital product manager John Bourne looks at some of the problems in how we showcase our courses to prospective students 

At Bristol we spend a lot of time and effort gathering and publishing information about our courses. Most of this is done centrally through our online prospectus, but this information also appears in a variety of other places. 

The University of Bristol homepage with course finder

Duplicated content across our site causes maintenance problems for staff. More importantly it means prospective students don’t really know where to find the most useful information to meet their needs.

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