Archive for November, 2009

Want to develop advanced skills in College website management?  The Communications Division currently has a fixed term vacancy to cover maternity leave which would be an ideal internal secondment opportunity. The position is available from January 2010-February 2011, but 2 x six month secondments would also be considered.  

We’re looking for a highly organised and enthusiastic Digital Media Coordinator to enhance the user experience of the College’s digital media.

You will play a central role in maintaining and improving the top level of the website, through ensuring existing web content is accurate and engaging, and by developing and producing compelling new content for a range of audiences. Based on a solid understanding of the College’s strategic objectives, you will also develop web microsites, manage the College homepage feature calendar, encourage user generated content online and project manage new online initiatives.

You will also help coordinate the work of the in-house video production team, acting as the key point of contact for shoots, preparing filming plans and organising locations.

Enthusiastic about all things digital and with a drive to improve user experience, you will have experience of project management and web editing as well as outstanding organisational and interpersonal skills.

Please note that this post is currently only available to College employees.

Deadline:  8 December 2009

• To find out more about the vacancy, visit the specific vacancy details – if you have any problems with the link, visit the employment homepage, click on “Job search” in the grey navigation bar, and search in the keyword box for the vacancy reference code: SS 2009 129TAA

• To talk informally about the position, contact Pamela Agar

Those of you who were at the last web workshop earlier this year may remember that we were planning a new image cropping tool for the College CMS editor. I’m pleased to report that the tool is close to completion and due for release very soon.

The image manager is the first in a series of improvements we’re planning for the College CMS editor. In this development, we want to make it much easier for you to upload and resize images in the CMS – and ensure that pictures within your pages are accessible and quick to render.

With the new tool, you’ll be able to upload pictures, select the size you want and crop or adjust the image area. The tool will then optimise the photograph for the web, so your pages will load more quickly, and finally add it to your webpage with the correct styles and alt text.

The tool has been developed by a team made up of staff from Communications, ICT and the Faculty of Natural Sciences. We’re doing final testing now and I’ll confirm the release date in the next few days…

Does your site include information for current or prospective students?  If so, check out the new team of student bloggers.

We launched student blogs in January 2009 for prospective students to find out more about what Imperial student life is really like. The blogs quickly picked up a good following, with prospective students commenting and asking questions.  Since the launch, they have won a UCDA design award and eduStyle awards for most innovative website and best institution sponsored blog.

Following on from the success of last year’s student blogs, we’ve selected a second cohort of bloggers. Three members of the first blogging team have stayed on and are joined by seven new bloggers recruited at the beginning of this academic term.

We need your help!

We want to make sure prospective students find the blogs, so to help promote them, we’ve created a web advert for you.  You can see the advert on the Web Guide homepage.  If you manage web pages for prospective or current students, you can easily add this advert to the right hand grey navigation bar on your homepage or particular pages.

In order to place the advert on your site, follow these steps:

• Right click on this link – and select “save target as” or “save link as”. Save this to your desktop.
• Right click on the file on your desktop, and select “Open with” – choose “notepad” or “simple text” (or any simple plain text editor.) When you open this file, it should display a short piece of code.
• Copy and paste the full piece of code into the HTML view of a content area in your grey navigation bar.
• If you’re not sure how to add content to the right hand grey navigation bar on your site, please visit the Web Guide FAQs.  If you need any help, please contact the Service Desk or comment on this post.
• It would be really helpful if you could comment on this blog post with the URLs of any pages where you add the blogging advert.

More about the student blogs

The opportunity to become an official Imperial student blogger was promoted throughout Freshers’ Week through adverts on Facebook and the College and Union sites, posters, flyers and word of mouth.  Students keen to join the team were asked to write 600 words about their life as a student, with entries judged by a panel from Imperial College Union and Communications Division.  The panel were keen to ensure a good cross section of disciplines, nationalities and years amongst the bloggers, as well as having a team of engaging and enthusiastic bloggers – and judging by their first few posts, we’ve got a great team!

Our bloggers aim to blog at least once a week on their life as a student at Imperial, and are encouraged to include photos and videos in their blogs.  They aren’t paid, but receive incentives and prizes during their time on the team.  All bloggers receive a digital camera and other goodies when they join, and each month our “blogger awards” recognise those who blog most regularly, who receive the most comments and who try unusual approaches to reporting.  In order to ensure an authentic student voice, we monitor but don’t pre-moderate the blogs and the bloggers themselves review and approve comments.

We hope that you enjoy reading and commenting on the student blogs.  Let us know what you think!

Thanks to those of you who have already completed the site editor survey – we’ve had over 70 responses so far. We’ll keep the survey open until Monday 23 November, so if you haven’t yet had time to contribute, there’s still time! It shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes to complete an entry – and you’ll be able to shape the priorities of the Content Forum by doing so.

Big congratulations to Zoe Perkins for winning the survey prize draw earlier this week – she wins £25 Amazon vouchers. Zoe is the Marketing Communications Manager in the Office of Alumni and Development looking after their web content.  We’re featuring part of the alumni website on the College homepage tomorrow, so have a look!

We’ve spent the last few weeks calling and emailing everyone on the existing College site owner list to introduce the Content Forum, and to double check we have an up to date contact list for the website.   So, if you’re receiving this blog post as an automatic email, it means that we think you are involved in editing some part of Imperial’s website!

We’ve published the updated site owner list on the Web Guide – it would be really helpful if you could have a look at the spreadsheet and check that we’ve assigned you to the correct sites.  If you have departmental colleagues who also edit your site and who are not on this list – please can you forward their details to me (Pamela Agar) so we can ensure they are included.  If you don’t have anything to do with editing the College website, and want to be removed from this alert list, let me know.

Complete our survey – and win £25 Amazon vouchers!

As you may know, we’re also running a site editor survey – to find out a bit more about who’s editing the site (roles, experience, needs etc) so we can make sure we develop useful Content Forum activities.    We’ll publish a summary of the findings on the blog later this month.

Complete the survey by Friday 13th November and you’ll be in for a chance to win £25 Amazon vouchers in a draw of all entries.

Enjoy our blog

We’ll be using this blog, with its automated email alerts to site editors, as our main form of communication from the Content Forum – so expect to hear about web developments, site launches and editing tips. Find out more about the Forum blog.