The School of Psychology at Bangor has been for many years one of the highest rated Psychology departments in the UK, with an RAE rating of 5*A. In 2000 I was tasked to re-design a web presence for the school fitting for their international status. This page contains the following sections:
The following is a screenshot of the homepage:
Re-development of the School of Psychology website was a complex and involved process, the main stages of which I will highlight here.
A large phase of the project involved conducting research with staff and students as to what would make the 'perfect' departmental website. In the process, I produced a questionnaire sent to hundreds of local school-leavers and current students, and conducted focus groups. I collated a mass of results, and produced a wide report, with recommendations. The report was circulated for the benefit of the whole University, and formed the back-bone of the website specification.
The development phase balanced both new content development, and technical implementation. To implement the specification, a lot of new content was required, and I was responsible for managing the process of involving a number of academic and administrative staff in writing new material for the website. The actual technical development of the website also needed careful management. Consultation with a working group of academic staff was maintained throughout to ensure the website met their design sensibilities. This involved user testing, and was a iterative process.
The website was implemented using the excellent open source server software Zope. My colleague Sion Morris was responsible for the implementation of this software, and some of the higher back-end coding.
The website went live the day school leavers received their A-level results in August 2001. The website was well received by both staff and students, and I heard many anecdotal stories complementing my website throughout the UK and abroad!
Results fed back to me in June 2002 showed a 20% increase in university
applications over the previous year since the new website was launched
in conjunction with the School's wider marketing campaign. In addition,
an external teaching quality assessment report conducted in 2001 summarised
that the development of the School's pages on the Web
were of high quality
.
The development of the website has since been taken over by an external agency, and was relaunched in Autumn 2004. To see the new new website, visit www.psychology.bangor.ac.uk.
Due to my website no longer being live, full-sized screenshots are provided below of sample work I produced:
This website and its content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
