Blog posts

Making your website more searchable

 

Photograph of a laptop showing Google search results

One of the most popular questions I am asked is ‘how do I make my website more searchable?’. With so much of our traffic coming from search engines like Google, Bing and Baidu (other search engines are available!), Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is really important. So what can you do as an editor to improve how your web pages appear in search results? In this post I will share some tips. (more…)

Accessibility tricks and treats

Three lit halloween pumpkins and candles next to a laptop showing the Imperial accessibility website
As you may be aware there were some new digital accessibility regulations that came into force last year called the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018. These regulations mean that all public sector bodies (including universities) must ensure websites and mobile applications are more accessible.

There is a project being undertaken to ensure the College fulfils its obligations and to identify those websites and applications that don’t meet the College’s standards.

So what are our standards?

At the College we aim to meet WCAG 2.1 standards (level AA). Most of these standards are to do with the way that the content is structured and delivered in terms of the underlying code in the templates and content types. If you are using the College’s centrally supported websites (such as T4), then most of these things are out of your control as an editor. But, there are some things that are in your control such as how you add images, links and other content to your pages.

With Halloween fast-approaching I thought I would ease any fears and share some tricks and treats to show you how easy it is to improve your content.

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Interpreting your Google Analytics data

Dog behind a laptop showing Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a very powerful tool which tracks how people interact with the pages they visit, this includes:

  • which pages they go to
  • how long they spend on them
  • where they came from i.e. did they use a search, type a web address in directly, click on a link in a newsletter etc.
  • what type of device they used
  • where in the world they were

and much much more.

Google Analytics records hundreds and hundreds of types of information that you can combine to build a picture of how people use our websites. Having access to all this data can be overwhelming and most of you won’t have the time (or patience) to trawl through it all.  We just need a few pieces of information to help us understand how our site is performing.

In this post I’ll explain some of main metrics to look out for and how you should interpret these to inform your content decisions. (more…)