KentWeb: the next phase of the Kent website

We’re continuing to improve the Kent website with a new mobile-friendly look and new features. Here’s what will change in the coming months.

Background
We’re undertaking a project to improve the Kent website as part of a focus on the online digital experience for our prospective and current students, staff and partners.

For many people, our website is the first connection they have with the University and it needs to reflect the high quality of our research, education and engagement goals.

We’ve already made significant developments, and there’s more planned for 2017. Improvements coming up include:

Changing Quick Links to an Audience Bar – January 2017
We will remove the ‘Quick Links’ drop-down menu from Kent web pages, and replace it with the option to choose information for students, staff, alumni, or a particular department. You’ll see the most popular systems and services and an ‘autocomplete’ search box.

Over the years, the Quick Links list has become long and unwieldy. It’s no longer so important now that the website’s search has improved considerably.

New look webpages – February 2017
We’re aiming to make some of our most heavily visited pages live in the new look by the end of February 2017.

These will include 12 top-level pages under the Research, Study and Engagement sections, plus the undergraduate and postgraduate courses section.

We chose these based on a workshop with stakeholders across the University (including Recruitment and Marketing, Research, Corporate Communications, the Development Office, and International Development), plus website user analytics and research we’d already carried out over the past couple of years.

The University home page and News Centre pages are already live (in beta) in the new look. We have received lots of useful feedback on them.

Image Guidelines – March 2017
If you’re a web editor, we know you’d like help with sourcing images and making best use of video and rich media on your web pages. We will produce some guidelines for you by March.

Web Symposium – April 2017
Attend our Web Symposium in April and we’ll update you on plans to expand the theme to school and department web pages.

We will show you a pilot school website in the new theme and you’ll find out how to upgrade your school or department web pages and edit them easily with a new simple editing tool that will replace Dreamweaver. Look out for more information on this in the New Year.