School of Cultural Studies, University of Winchester (2004, 2005, 2009)

The remit for this site was to design ASAP (within 3 weeks), a site which would attract new students to modules offered by the School of Cultural Studies, offering a variety of entry points, in particular through subject specialities, including American Studies, English, Media & Film, and Theology & Religious Studies. The site was also intended to be useful for current students.

• Some brief convesations (in person/online), and some general ideas for the site had been thought through.
• A new portal was in the process of being designed for the College, expected to ‘go live’ January 2005, and as all information would eventually have to go on this site, I decided to make the site look like the new portal (with a few tweaks to ensure suitability as a standalone site). The portal was designed in .asp, but a near-match was produced using tables in Dreamweaver.
• The menu structure was also copied across from the portal, as this had been designed for use by all Schools across the College, and the data fits relatively neatly into this system.
• Information was collated asap. Fortunately a lot of it was electronic and suitable for repurposing. The key pages were set up within the specified timespan, with a handover document given to staff to allow others to continue updating the site.

Cultural Studies on the Portal

• Once the new portal was live, I was invited back to transfer the majority of the information across to the new portal, using a Content Management System.
• Before being offered the job at Manchester, I had been in discussions with the IT Department to offer training to different departments to: provide advice as to what would make for ‘good’ web content;
• ensure that departments had a plan for keeping their sites updated;
• ensure a consistent look and feel to different departments across the University

2009
In 2009, I was employed to go through the University of Winchester site and remove any references to the School of Cultural Studies!