BU research website – new site coming this month

Over the last few months, M&C and RDS (formerly RKEO) have been working on a project to redevelop the research website and migrate its content into the main BU website.

The aims of the project are to revitalise some of our existing content, better profile our current research strengths and further support beneficial outcomes around our research from website visitors, including:

  • Additional research funding,
  • Collaboration and partnership,
  • Expanding international reputation,
  • Consultancy,
  • Expanding publishing and media coverage.

Members of the project team have visited Faculty Research & Professional Practice Committees / Faculty Research & Knowledge Exchange Committees across all faculties to share information and also gather feedback from academic staff.

The project began with a survey with over 90 academics to find out what they value about the existing research website, what they’d change and how we could better profile their research. We followed this up by working with each Deputy Dean for Research & Professional Practice to fully understand the requirements of all our faculties.

In addition to this, we explored examples of best web practice from around the world to identify the most effective ways of presenting complicated research-based information, such as universities and commercial technological research organisations.

We also broke down our overall research audience to identify the many objectives different classifications of people have in visiting our research content, and identifying how best to create a beneficial user experience for them.

Throughout the autumn and winter, the cross-departmental team have been creating, editing and migrating new and old content. This is being carried out in collaboration with our academic staff, who will have the opportunity to both advise on and sign off any content referencing their work. Once complete, the existing site will be archived so as not to lose any existing content.

The new web content is going live on Thursday 25 April, from which point, we’ll offer full support to any academic needing to update different parts of the research content, specifically Centre, Institute and project content. The existing Research Blog will not be affected by this project at this stage

If anyone has any questions about the project, please contact Dan Ford, M&C or Rachel Bowen, RDS.

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