just-pressed

Just a quick update on the work for Bath Spa University’s School of Art and Design. In the 8 weeks since the site went live has been at the core of the drive to raise awareness of the new BA course, featuring links to Open Days and UCAS fairs and driving traffic to and from the Facebook page. We’ve monitored usage of the site, and optimised the content to ensure key information is seen, and given feedback about who has viewed the site following mailouts to ensure the target audience has been reached.

The keywords representing the course; idea material object; now return the top three results on a Google search and the course features on the first page when searching for BA three dimensional design (09 Dec 09).

To view the live site click here.

We’ve just finished a site for a new undergraduate course at Bath Spa University’s School of Art and Design. The site is required to be a focal point for the staff to talk about their personal areas of practice and thereby give an insight into what – and who – is inspiring them as well a place to publish work.

Developed as a multi-user site, contributions will come from all of who have connections to the course, it also relies on the staff utilising their connections to promote the course so social networking tools are an integral part of the design. As well as embedding social bookmarks into each page we also created a Facebook page and Twitter profiles, and integrated the publication of new items to be broadcast to these networking sites.

A significant amount of customisation was carried out to the side of the site the staff use to make adding content as simple as possible, the front was also heavily edited to create a consistent and clean feel. Heavy cropping gives a strong visual feel despite the fact that many different images will be posted and a ‘lightbox’ feature makes good use of the image galleries allowing a variety of images sizes to be scaled and displayed consistently.

This site will build over time and become a rich source of inspiration for both staff and students; view the live site for BA (Hons) Idea Material Object.

Earlier this year we helped set up an e-learning environment to observe collaborations between art and design students. The aim of the site was both to motivate students to add work to the site and to record their responses to the work.

We created a registration page to ensure only bona-fide students could participate, analytics software tracked the overall activity (though not that of individual students) on any items added. Students were allowed to create their own usernames to be displayed against the work and any comments left. A group were assigned as editors for the site who moderated comments and selected featured items. With a significant body of other students voluntarily registering as contributors and a ‘live’ comments box allowing real time conversations between students logged on to the site encouraging others to join in, the site became a dynamic and ever changing community.

The results of the study have now been completed and the resulting paper is being presented at the 8th European Conference on e-Learning in Bari, Italy.

Currently busy with a site for Northumbria University’s School of Design which is a little beyond the usual, collaboration is the focus of the site with registered users having access to distinct designated areas. A mix of video and image based content, taking advantage of WordPress threaded comment structure and allow discussion and review of work.

Much of the work on the site is invisible since it’s aimed at making adding content is as easy as writing an email. Primarily for use by students the site has an enhanced version for viewing on, and contributing from, an iPhone or iPod Touch.

We’re presently testing out the site, which should go live within the next month.

We’ve been working with Graphic Communication students at Bath Spa University’s School Of Art & Design to help them develop websites they can easily update. Building a clear and relevant portfolio site is essential in your first step into the world of work.

Links to more of the student sites soon.