Category: Web

New on the website

UK Dementia Research Institute (UK DRI) at Imperial

The challenge of dementia demands new concepts, new approaches and a diverse range of new research tools and directions. A diagnosis of dementia occurs every four seconds – the UK DRI at Imperial will play a unique role in aiming to stop this current trend.

www.imperial.ac.uk/uk-dri


Diabetes Network

The Network of Excellence in Diabetes was established in 2018 with the goal of gaining a better understanding of the disease process and developing innovative new approaches to treatment. Key research areas are in bioinspired engineering, pancreatic islet cell biology, and disease genetics. The Network aims to provide training in the technologies focussing on the interface between disciplines, linking basic research to clinical practice.

www.imperial.ac.uk/diabetes-network/

(more…)

New SharePoint sites

The Faculty of Medicine has released two new SharePoint sites designed to provide all Faculty of Medicine staff with access to a central key contacts list and process repository. You will need to use Office 365 login (collegeusername@ic.ac.uk) to access these sites.

Key Contacts

Purpose:

To provide one central list of key safety and other defined roles to ensure that this information is recorded, updated and reviewed and can be updated in one source. (more…)

Writing well for the web

People tend to read a web page differently than they do on paper. This means that the best approach when writing for the web is different from writing for print. A website works best if people can find what they need quickly, complete their task and leave without having to think about it too much.

Writing for the webThe guidance on writing for Imperial’s website is based on research into how people read online and how people use the website. You can access this guidance as an online web skills module or through one of the monthly training sessions run by the College.

Upcoming sessions

  • Thursday 22 June (10:00-13:00)
  • Tuesday 18 July 2017 (10:00-13:00)

To book a place on a session, email News and Digital Content Editor Andrew Youngson

Central ‘Faculty of Medicine’ webpages – looking a little bit different!

webpageAs you may well have noticed by now, the central ‘Faculty of Medicine’ website has moved into Imperial College’s new website content management system (CMS). These pages (the majority of pages under www.imperial.ac.uk/medicine)  have been migrated and refreshed to match the College’s new look and to deliver a better user experience for visitors to the site – no matter what device they may be using: mobile, tablet or desktop computer. To prepare for this transfer a team of editors in the Faculty have worked hard to review and recreate their existing pages into the new format, and we’d like to thank them for all their hard work.

This is the first phase of a programme of transfer for the many sites which are related to the Faculty of Medicine.  Sites will need to be moved from our current Faculty system (an older, CMS which is unique to our Faculty) into the College’s new, mobile-friendly system.  For more detail about future transfers, please see the ‘what’s next?’ section below.

What to expect from the new pages.

Now the new pages have gone live you’ll notice that existing urls and links to central Faculty information held on these pages have changed.  We’ve worked to keep a number of our most important url links going to their direct equivalent – but with such a large website move, it’s inevitable that some existing links to pages may no longer work as you expected. If the old link you are used to using has changed, you’ll either be redirected to the appropriate general area of the new site, or be taken to a ‘404’ page which will attempt to locate a relevant page in the new site.  Alternatively you can use the College search box which appears at the top of every web page.

We want your feedback.

We are very interested to hear your experiences of using the new site as you get to know it during the first few months after launch.  In particular we’d very much value your opinion of the new ‘For FoM staff’ section (we aim to continually improve this as a resource to complement the College level pages – and need your input to do that!).

What’s next?

The next stage of the project will be to rollout a programme of activity to work with site owners to help them migrate content from their departmental, unit or research group pages into the new system and designs. This activity will take a year to complete, and will be undertaken as a phased roll-out which will be planned with each of the Departments.  If you are a Faculty CMS site owner we will therefore be contacting you over the coming months to discuss your training needs and help you plan the transfer of your pages into the new system.


For more information about the College-wide web project, please visit:
http://www.imperial.ac.uk/staff/tools-and-reference/web-guide/projects/web-redesign/

For information on how to prepare your web pages for the new system please visit: http://www.imperial.ac.uk/staff/tools-and-reference/web-guide/projects/web-redesign/guidance/


Desmond Samuel

Digital Communications and Marketing Strategy Manager
Faculty of Medicine

 

New Faculty of Medicine website

After a few exceptionally busy months, we relaunched our Faculty webpages on Friday 17 January 2014.

The new website has been in development for a while to showcase the work of the Faculty within our main research themes. In order to do this, research landing pages have been developed and the old and out of date material removed.

Our research on film

A large and exciting part of the project was to produce a high quality video for each ‘research landing page’ to more easily communicate what the Faculty is doing in each main area of research. Whilst the filming was completed in late-October (thank you to all that were involved!), the editing process took a bit longer than had been anticipated – trying to cut down the footage filmed in half in order to fit into the time allocated for each video was tricky.

We produced 13 videos in total: 11 for the research themes, another to give an overview of our research and one to better communicate how, through the AHSC and NIHR Imperial BRC, the Faculty translates its research.

Other objectives for the website were to:

  • Improve the homepage:
    • making it easier to navigate to key content
    • better promote news, social media activity and other content
    • increase awareness of the Academic Health Science centre and our other strategic initiatives
  • Improve the way we are communicating research across the Faculty:
    • Creating a much improved “Our research” landing page
    • Better communication of the AHSC, NIHR Imperial BRC and other strategic partnerships and initiatives
  • Review, reduce and re-prioritise content:
    • Changing our main navigation
    • Culling old, out of date and unused content
  • Audience focussed architecture:
    • Re-purposing “teaching” into “Prospective students” giving a better overview of our courses / education and in particular our Master’s degrees
    • Better information / signposting for Staff
    • Better content for the “about us” section
  • Preparation for the College website re-design / CMS project:
    • Details below

College website re-design project

With the new College website design and content management system (CMS) on the horizon, we have taken the opportunity to review content, and where necessary, cull out of date, old and redundant pages. This will make transferring to the new design and CMS a much easier, and less time consuming, process.

By using Google Analytics data (and information on when pages were last edited), we reviewed page views etc to decide what content was clearly not being visited and where content was extremely old, removing it from the website.

There is still work to be done to further improve the website and we are looking forward to getting to grips with a new content management system and college website design in the coming months.

We’ll be in touch with website editors and owners in the coming months to discuss and plan how the wider faculty website transfer process is to happen.

If you have any comments or questions, please use the comments section below.

James and Al
Digital Communications Team, Faculty of Medicine

Faculty of Medicine Communications Survey update

We received over 700 responses to the Faculty Communications survey – thank you to all of those that responded! Your contribution is very much appreciated.

Winners

Richard Colquhoun (Neonatal Data Analysis Unit Manager, Department of Medicine) and Jocelyn Elmes (Research Assistant, School of Public Health) were each a recipient of a £50 amazon voucher.

What next?

Survey resultsThe data from the survey is being analysed – we will be working to identify some key activities to improve communication across the Faculty and in particular improve communication across the campuses which appeared to be a concern for a lot of those that responded. It also appears that information flows across all areas in the Faculty aren’t ideal at present so again, we will be looking at what could be done to improve this.

If you have any comments, ideas or suggestions, please post a comment below, contact James Moore or Neil Young. We’d be really interested in hearing anything you have to share.

We’ll be providing a summary of the results in the coming weeks.

Insta-help

Here are a few links to information which appeared to be a common bug-bear amongst a number of people that completed the survey:

Twitter avatar competition winner

The Winning EntryThe Twitter avatar competition, launched back in December 2011, has now closed. The Faculty would like to thank all those who entered.

The entries were judged by Professor Sir Anthony Newman Taylor, Principal of the Faculty of Medicine, and Professor Jenny Higham, Deputy Principal of the Faculty of Medicine.

We are pleased to announce the winning entry (opposite) is from Dave Taylor and Robin Winter, from Medical Media and Design Laboratory (MMDL) in the Department of Surgery and Cancer, who will share the prize.

The avatar is a stylised version of the iconic image of Sir Alexander Fleming’s plate culture of the fungus Penicillium notatum; the design honours this discovery which was made whilst working at St. Mary’s (now one of the constituent medical campuses of the Faculty of Medicine).

The avatar can now be seen adorning our Twitter and Flickr pages.

We received a number of excellent entries from staff and students from around the Faculty which can be seen in the gallery below:

Competition: Design the FoMImperial Twitter avatar and win £50 amazon voucher

Our current avatar - the Twitter default

The Faculty of Medicine can now be found on Twitter @FoMImperial – and we want to stand out!

So, we are launching a competition for you to design the ‘avatar‘ for the Faculty. The avatar should be iconic and standout bearing in mind that there are currently around 175million twitter users. The winner will receive a £50 amazon voucher!

The avatar of our Twitter page should be recognisable and representative of the world-leading teaching and research carried out by the Faculty of Medicine here at Imperial College London.

What you need to do:

  • Design a new twitter avatar for the Faculty of Medicine which should:
    • be a maximum of 250 pixels by 250 pixels
    • be a maximum size of 700k
    • be in JPG, GIF, PNG format
    • be iconic and representative
    • stand out
    • be with or without text
    • not include the letters ‘IC’ for Imperial College
    • not be stolen (i.e. taken from another Twitter users’ page)

Examples of other Twitter avatars:

Entry:

Important:

  • You must have copyright for any images used and any proof of ownership should be provided
  • Images obtained via the Digital Image library can be used freely (https://imageslib.cc.ic.ac.uk/BMS/index.cfm)
  • No images depicting graphic medical procedures should be used
  • This avatar will also to be used as the Faculty of Medicine Flickr avatar
  • We have the right to suggest changes, within reason,  and the original files should be provided if you are successful in winning
  • You can only enter once
  • This competition is open to all staff and students from the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London – Any entries outside of the faculty will not be considered.
  • The entries will be judged by representatives from across the Faculty
  • The winner will be contacted by e-mail, and the winning entry will be formally announced via Twitter and the Faculty of Medicine website
  • The Faculty reserves the right to choose an alternative image should no appropriate avatar be identified by the review panel from entries received.

GOOD LUCK!

 

Tips:

  • Save this blank template as a starting point (Right click and choose “Save As…”)
  • You could use Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator to design the avatar
  • Alternatively, you could use free image editing software: Gimp

Survey on Professional Web Pages (PWPs)

A review is underway of Professional Web Pages (PWPs), which are used on the College website to offer contact details and information about the activities of staff such as publications and awards. To guide a redesign of PWPs, staff are invited to participate in a survey to help identify the content and features which are particularly important for current and future users of these online profiles. The survey should take about five minutes to complete, and all those who complete the survey will be entered into a draw to win a £100 Amazon voucher.