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New Website: Your questions answered

Work on the new Highlands College website is progressing well, and it feels really exciting to be working with the creative and ambitious team at Halo (the supplier).

We want to keep you informed with what’s happening behind the scenes – and encourage you to chat to any of our web team about the process.

Last week we hosted our first drop-in session in Cafe Connect. We’ll be back tomorrow (17th December) and encourage anyone with a question, idea or thought about the new website to join us (Jess Tidswell & Rob Moy).

Please do get involved in this project as it’s really important we create something that benefits everyone.

The two workshops which were held with representatives from different departments last week were hugely successful.

It was great to see so many people take up the opportunity to speak directly with Halo (the supplier) about what they’d like to see on the new site.

Your Questions Answered…

Q: Has the supplier thought about what translation options will be available on the website?

A: Yes, a deeper exploration of this will take place in the next few weeks. Halo’s initial thoughts are below:

    • We’re yet to decide on an accessibility plugin, there’s also an option to make our own, this will mostly depend on design.
    • We will likely be using Google Translate services.
    • Screen reader and navigator support will be available.
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Q: Will there be an option to ‘pay now’ when signing up to a course on the website?
A: This is part of Halo’s next stage of the project and the specifics of this will be looked at in the coming weeks. A call will be set up with Rob Moy, Paul Antonio and the finance team to discuss.
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Q: Which site structures are being planned? Hub and spoke, Microsites etc.
A: Hub and spoke. We generally discourage ‘microsites’, mainly due to technical reasons, they are also a SEO / UX anti-pattern.
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Q: What coding language is being used?
A: PHP for the server end, JavaScript driven front end (not in an SPA way, but rather components that need reactiveness would be based in VueJS), if the component is simple it will be just done twig templating and css for styling.
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Q: Which CMS is planned?
A: CraftCMS seems like a good fit at this stage.
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Q: How is future integration being supported by the answers to the above questions?
A: We would need to know what those integrations are for us to be able to support you in the best way.
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Q: Will the new site have a more vibrant section for each course, with photos/videos/example work/meet the staff info, which will hopefully encourage more signups?
A: Absolutely! We will begin filming content in departments in the new year.

Submit your questions

As we move along with the project, there’s always the chance to submit your questions/thoughts/ideas via the QR code below, or by clicking here, and they will be answered here, in the weekly bulletin.

What’s Next?

Over the next few weeks Halo will work on creating the ‘User Personas’ of our new website – this will draw together all the feedback from user experience (UX) workshops which have taken place over the past month.

They will present their findings to us in the new year – we’ll then share this via the weekly bulletin.

Keeping Up-to-Date

Please come along to our Tuesday lunchtime drop-in sessions to keep posted on the details of the project.

 

 

The Highlands College Web Team

Rob Moy – Deputy Principal – Project Sponsor

Paul Antonio – Associate Principal – Data and care system interface

Terry Walters – Head of IT Services – IT Integration and Tech Support

Jess Tidswell – Head of Marketing & Events – Marketing & Client Lead

Sharon Ward – Associate Principal – Governance and Compliance

Liam McDermott – Bursar – Financial Advisor

Nicola Brown – Head of Student Life & Designated Safeguarding Lead – Student Engagement

Rebecca Stephenson – Digital Pedagogy & Blended Learning – Digital Learning

Jessica Tidswell

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