Alex H's pages - home

Things I'm supposed to be working on on UPSU.net: projects, news, updates, and so on

What am I working on at the moment?

01.07.2007: Tomorrow is my first official day as a Sabb - I begin my month handover with Fraggy, and from the 1st August the stabilisers come off and I'm free to make a mess of everything I touch.

Well, something like that, anyway. Enjoy your summer hols and see y'alls in October!

Toodles :o) /al

What's wrong with UPSU.net?

Tell us what's wrong with UPSU.net:

What's coming soon?

Projects I'm hoping to work on in the near future include:

Pugwash online
Blogs homepage
"Ask UPSU a question" component
JobShop component
Clubs and societies
SEFURL tool
Redesign of club and society portal pages
Redesign of other Get Involved portal pages
Profile page layout
Forums
More...

All I want for Christmas is... (but I can't do these things on my own):

Sabbs blogging
In order to keep students updated on what they're doing, and why they're doing it.
Club and society involvement in UPSU.net
Encourage clubs and socs to:
(a) take ownership of their webpages on the site to get the best out of them
(b) start creating or submitting news
... so we can start seeing much more interactivity and variation of content on the site.
News and features
Get more news content on the site from more (new) people, and get Pugwash online. To do this, I/we need to provide the why's and how's of creating news and start encouraging the relevant managers to make the most of this website!

More!
I want to redesign the news section - here's what I'd like to see, and some inspiration:

Cleaner layout, better use of images and graphics
More emphasis on the use of syndication and sharing; more (but less intrusive?) RSS feeds, providing a better range of content, and a better implementation of how we allow people to share and distribute our content
A wider range of content - mentioned above, but as the core reason for doing all of this, it's definitely worth another mention: I want to see a good range of diverse, interesting and thought-provoking content.
The site's news content shouldn't just be a by-product of the printed publications - online media costs less to maintain (but this is arguably balanced out by initial development costs...?), so why aren't we seeing more content online than we have in print? See below... ;o)

What's wrong with UPSU.net news?
Why I think UPSU.net doesn't have a whole load of news going up on it...

The current system is fairly inaccessible to new users - it's hard to work out how to place news content online, fiddly to edit using the (occasionally badly behaved) WYSIWYG editor, and generally a reasonable source of criticism both from myself (the person who compiled UPSU.net's Mambo distro), and various other members of the website and UPSU staff,
Few people see any point in creating content when they don't see the benefits of having work published online (and attributed to them),
Navigating news isn't exactly as clear as it could be - this comes back to my earlier comments, but this is a real issue for me; there has to be a balance of news on the news homepage, but how we handle this balance could probably do with being more dynamic as we often have large areas of stagnant content on the news homepage while some streams are being very rapidly updated.
The homepage doesn't show a comprehensive digest of news - which means that people who only visit the homepage often miss important stories because they're not being directed to the news which applies to them. How can we fix this?

Better signposting of the fact we have a LOT of news content inside the news section,
Better use of promotional opportunities - website banners, co-operative advertising opportunities (e.g. ads for music reviews in the social:life sections, etc), and so on - to improve traffic through the news areas,

How can we fix this? How can we encourage people to come to us with their news ideas?

Answers on a postcard to the usual address - I have my own ideas, but my battery's about to run out and the Bill's on, so I'll work more on this later ;o)
More pro-active gathering of feedback - polls, click-through analysis, competitions encouraging people to explore the site, opening up more discussions (on issues which interest students and spark debate!)...,
Better use of syndication - can we strike a deal with related websites - Wessex Scene Online and other student websites/publications?
Better use of our existing resources - Pugwash, PWs, and so on,
... and the list goes on... :o)

(Sort-of) Finished stuff

September 2006: The new homepage
September 2006: The new NUS card registration and issue desk system
February 2007: iCalendar exporting from the diaries
February 2007: personal notes thing
May 2007: organic groups restrictions on content
June 2007: site-wide tracking/auditing system
July 2007: Grad Ball mini site (about)

More about my projects

What's this page?

This page is a way of me keeping tabs on the things I'm supposed to be working on, what I've been doing, and that kind of thing.

It's different to my blog because these pages will probably go into a lot more detail, so it's best not to clutter up what is already a fairly wordy, boring part of the site (I'm talking about my blog here, just to make sure you understand... ;o) ).