The University Web Strategy (https://edin.ac/web-strategy-2018) identified a programme of activities, including the development of new web publishing tools or web publishing platform.
“There is a fragmentation of technology, working methods and standards, which leads to uneven and, in some cases, broken user journeys.” – University Web Strategy
The strategy stated that “it is important to recognise that technology is not a solution but an enabler. Whether delivered centrally or locally, there is a clear need to empower our staff by providing them with the intelligence, tools, standards and resources to attract and engage users.”
Building a New Platform
Our Web Publishing Platform (now named EdWeb 2) project’s aim was to create a web publishing platform for our publishing community within a strong web governance framework. Therefore, this project should not be viewed solely in isolation but within the wider context of the web strategy. The goal was to create a platform that could be continually improved, meet the immediate needs of our existing editorial base but also meet the needs of Schools and business units that had never used the central service for web publishing before.
The web strategy identified the following common approaches:
- Improve the quality of our web estate and online channels through the adoption of an inclusive and supportive governance model
- Enhance the accessibility and security of our web estate by establishing and evolving University-wide standards
- Enhance solution and content quality by improving the digital skills of web publishers and practitioners; establishing a common understanding of web roles and capabilities; and delivering web publishing and management tools
“The strategy does not set out to answer the exclusive needs of a business area or address a single specific University activity. As a pan-institutional strategy, it establishes a framework for the use of web technologies, both centrally and locally, to achieve business goals.” – University Web Strategy
To address these common approaches the web publishing platform aimed to deliver a product that was flexible and geared for iterative improvement to support ongoing business and user demands.
The delivered solution needed to support central and local innovation, allowing website teams in schools to make use of and extend the product appropriately, aligned with agreed University standards and guidelines.
This project has delivered the platform and associated processes to create the web publishing services that will support this strategy.
This includes a high-quality, future-proof and long-term sustainable University web publishing platform, aligned web publishing services, training and a support model, all backed up by a team with the requisite knowledge and skills.
Successes
Planning
- Platform training programme with the planning, development and roll out in very close collaboration with our Digital Skills team was very successful, and receiving excellent feedback (Phase 2 – Deliverable 1.3)
- Major achievement to deliver a fit-for-purpose, web platform, fulfilling the targets set regarding flexibility, migrating over 60 sites live despite some of the complex issues faced by the project. (Phase 1 – Deliverable 1.3)
- Early and ongoing engagement with the service users, and the wider web publishing community, was essential to ensure the web platform developed in a meaningful way to address their external audience engagement needs. (Phase 1 – Deliverable 1.2, 7.1)
- The project has delivered a solution in line with the original University Web Strategy in terms of the flexibility offered and that the offering should appeal to Schools and business units that have never used the central service at all for their web publishing. For example the School of Chemistry now has a live site on EdWeb 2. (Phase 2 – Objective 4, Deliverable 4.1)
Developing for our Wider Community
The University of Edinburgh is a highly devolved organisation in terms of physical locations, organisational structure, decision-making and budgets, purposes, goals and audiences.
Aside from the central team, our community extends across the organisation, from system administrators and developers to UX and user-centred design practitioners, content creators and marketers, each operating with significant autonomy and responsibility for their own sites. We had to take this into consideration as early as possible in any decision-making process, and to emphasise the importance of user centred design, backed up by user research, and using the experience and expertise of staff around the University.
The new platform had to work for existing users of our CMS but also support the needs of our devolved community of developers and administrators who are responsible for building, developing and managing our wider web estate, from colleges and schools to individual research projects.
We chose to continue using Drupal as this platform and surrounding processes support highly distributed development, allowing code contribution back to a managed common modular code base.
Project Approach
The project was approached in two main phases, with the ultimate goal to have introduced the new web publishing platform and having all relevant EdWeb content and sites migrated to the new platform by November 2022 (the initial deadline for Drupal 7 end-of-life).
The deadline of completing the migration needed to be moved due to the extremely complex nature of the websites built in EdWeb, and the differences between the two platforms, as well as ongoing resourcing issues and is currently set for November 2024.
The project involved the application of Agile methodologies using the Scrum framework and has tried to use a user-centred approach to service design wherever possible.
“User-centered design is based on the understanding of a user, their demands, priorities and experiences and when used, is known to lead to an increased product usefulness and usability as it delivers satisfaction to the user. “ – Wikipedia User-centered design