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28 February 2012

Keeping our cookies legal

Filed under: News,Newsletter — Tags: , , , — Keith Brooke @ 9:15 am

…cookies are small, often encrypted text files, located in browser directories. They are used by web developers to help users navigate their websites efficiently and perform certain functions. Due to their core role of enhancing/enabling usability or site processes, disabling cookies may prevent users from using certain websites.

—allaboutcookies.org

In 2009 an EU directive was introduced requiring website owners to obtain consent for use of cookies and similar technologies. Governments in Europe were given until 25 May 2011 to implement these changes into their own law. The UK introduced the amendments on 25 May 2011 through The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) (Amendment) Regulations 2011.

WaLT Cookies

One problem with this was that current technologies make it virtually impossible for anything more than very basic websites to comply. Like most sites, the University’s website sets cookies as soon as a page is loaded, so it’s impossible to obtain prior consent from users; if a user opts to disallow our cookies, they need to know how to do this in their browser settings. In recognition of these difficulties, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) gave UK websites a 12 month grace period in which to comply; work is also being carried out with web browser providers to ensure that browsers include easier options for control of cookies.

Initial response

When the new law was introduced there was much debate among web teams in the HE sector about how it should be implemented. Based on advice from sources such as JISC Legal and the Information Commissioner, most, including Essex, opted for a cautious approach. Actions we took included:

  • a quick review of our use of cookies (a complete review wasn’t warranted, given that we were planning to launch a completely new website on new server infrastructure during the 12 month grace period);
  • a review of our privacy policy, which is where most websites include information about their use of cookies; other than a few minor tweaks our policy did not require change as it already gave clear information about our use of cookies;
  • regular monitoring of best practice, official guidance and discussion with other web teams.

Preparing for implementation

The Information Commissioner issued new guidance on 13 December 2011, to mark the halfway point between legislation and implementation.

According to this guidance, and updated advice from JISC Legal, we should take the following steps:

  1. “Check what type of cookies and similar technologies you use and how you use them.”
    WaLT will be carrying out an audit of cookies issued by our websites. This will document what cookies we set, their purpose and the impact if users opt to reject them.
  2. “Assess how intrusive your use of cookies is.”
    Part of the audit assessment will categorise each cookie according to how intrusive it is. This will allow us to target any future efforts on achieving compliance most effectively.
  3. “Where you need consent – decide what solution to obtain consent will be best in your circumstances.”
    Best practice at present appears to be to provide users with clear information about how to disable cookies. It’s possible that this practice will shift, depending on further advice from ICO and when we see how ICO starts to enforce the new law, and we need to be prepared to respond as necessary.
  4. “Improve the clarity, completeness and prominence of information about cookies which is provided to users of your websites.”
    Our privacy policy compares well with the others in the sector with regards to cookie legislation. One action we should take is to review its prominence: rewording links to our policy will help with this, changing ‘privacy policy’ to ‘privacy and cookies policy’, or simply ‘privacy and cookies’; this is a measure that many in the sector are taking. When our cookie audit is complete, it would also be prudent to add an appendix listing details of the cookies we set.

Implications for University web authors

This is the bit you’re waiting for, isn’t it? How much work do we need to do?

Hopefully not too much. All corporate pages link to the privacy policy. Sub-sites should also link to the policy; if your site doesn’t then make sure you add the link. And if your site sets any additional cookies, you may need to consider further steps: reviewing whether you really need to set those extra cookies, and if so, creating a privacy policy that covers these uses. This shouldn’t affect most authors: if you’re setting extra cookies you probably already know. If you’re uncertain, or need advice, just contact WaLT.

Conclusion

In summary, WaLT have been closely monitoring developments in implementation of cookie law and the University has maintained a position of good practice since the law was passed. It remains unclear how ICO will start to enforce the law when the 12-month grace period expires in May 2012, but the best advice appears to be that if we follow the steps outlined here we will (a) place ourselves in the best position to respond as practices change, and (b) have established a record of acting in the best faith – a strategy highlighted in advice from ICO, JISC Legal and others as one of the best forms of protection against action.


20 February 2012

Does SEO make a difference?

Filed under: Handy hint,Newsletter — Tags: , , , — Keith Brooke @ 5:08 pm

Look on the web and you’ll find thousands of guides to search engine optimisation. (It’d be ironic if you couldn’t find them, wouldn’t it?) We even have our own guide to working with search engines.

Recently we had the opportunity to put some of this into practice and measure the results, and it’s nice to see that it worked.

The CISH website is a perfectly good website. It does what it’s supposed to do. But when we came to look at how well it could be found by search engines there was definite room for improvement.

So in January we set to work. Some of the things we did included:

  • We prioritised efforts on the main landing pages: it’s a site that covers several subject areas, so we made sure that the landing page for each key area (humanities, Latin American studies, American (US) studies and European studies) was optimised for search engines.
  • We made sure that pages had meaningful, search-friendly titles.
  • We added relevant meta tags for description and keywords (an old-fashioned and possibly out-dated approach, but it would lose nothing and does still appear to have an influence).
  • We made sure that our desired search keywords worked on the prioritised pages, making sure they featured in heading tags, page title, meta tags, first paragraphs, and featured prominently in various keyword density checks.
  • We broke the pages up with appropriate sub-headings (again, containing relevant keywords).
  • The label ‘American (United States) Studies’ was correctly used throughout the site; while correct as a term, it was damaging for the most likely searches such as ‘American studies’. We rephrased this so that one landing page emphasised ‘American studies’ and another ‘United States studies’.
  • Because ‘US’ is likely to be seen as a word fragment or ignorable minor word, we expanded many uses to the full ‘United States’ wherever possible. Similarly, we cut down on  the previously frequent abbreviations of Latin American to LA.
  • We added a Google-friendly site map.
  • And finally, we made sure we didn’t go over the top: heavy-handed keyword loading can damage your search engine performance, and certainly spoils the user experience. There’s no point making sure people can find you if your pages are poorer as a consequence.

The results were good. Three weeks on, we performed the same Google searches we had carried out before starting work in January and compared results.

Before 31 January, CISH did okay for specific searches, so was number 1 for ‘humanities essex’, and ‘American studies essex’, but for terms like ‘humanities degree uk’, ‘BA humanities’, ‘latin American studies’, and ‘European studies degrees uk’ CISH was outside the top 100 results at Google.

Since optimising, no ranking has slipped, and the following examples have greatly improved. All of the following ranked CISH outside the top 100 before:

  • ‘European studies degrees’ now #14
  • ‘BA humanities’ now #2
  • ‘Essex USA’ now #9
  • ‘Latin American studies’ now #9
  • ‘humanities course’ now #29

So there were huge improvements for some search terms – to perform so well for relatively common terms such as ‘BA humanities’ and ‘Latin American studies’ is particularly impressive. It remains to be seen whether this has any effect on recruitment, but it can’t do us any harm!


7 February 2012

Rollout of new code, 7 February 2012

Filed under: News,Newsletter,web review 2011 — Keith Brooke @ 12:49 pm

When the new website went live last October, the incredibly tight deadline led to a number of compromises behind the scenes. In other words, the code we received was particularly hard to work with, and the templates were unscalable and extremely sensitive to anything we did.

For these reasons, a high priority for WaLT in recent weeks has been a complete rewrite of the templates and style sheets used on the main University website.

This is the kind of work IT teams do all the time: working long hours on tasks that will go unnoticed by the vast majority of users: a core team working on this project was in early today, and after the final tests and tweaks we switched over from old code to new on the public-facing webservers. And, we hope, nobody noticed it happening.

A few things to note:

  • the design remains the same, apart from a few minor tweaks;
  • the coding is now much more stable and easy to maintain; it will also be easier for us to work with as the site develops;
  • we did rebuild the lefthand navigation, to bring it closer to the system that had initially been planned for the October launch: do, please, check this in case any errors or inconsistencies have crept in.

We do appreciate the support we’ve had in this project. There’s always a danger that this kind of behind-the-scenes work can go unnoticed, but it is essential, and it’s good to have the backing of management and the understanding of those affected.


21 December 2011

Twelve notes of Christmas

Filed under: WaLT,web review 2011 — Victoria Samways @ 9:46 am

As part of the ongoing transparency initiative and keeping you up to date of what we are working on, here is a 12 days of Christmas countdown with from WaLT. Some helpful facts, amongst other musings.

12 other colleagues

Well we are getting a big bunch now, 13 in total, which is too many for the one office. LTT will still be down the corridor and to the left after Christmas. And you may have interactions with some of our newer team members Lina (part-time) and Josie. LTT telephone numbers are the same as before and if they are not available to answer it will come through to our main WaLT office.

11 .htm sites to move over

As some of you may be aware sites such as www.essex.ac.uk/ohsas, www.essex.ac.uk/personnel, & www.essex.ac.uk/scra are based on .htm pages (whereas many newer sites are .aspx pages).  Many of these sites use a way of creating their navigation that depending on older Front Page Server Extensions (FPSE) called “shared borders”. As the new server doesn’t support FPSE, it means that if you try to make amendments on a page, when it saves, it cannot create this navigation and therefore strips the navigation from the page entirely! So currently we are maintaining these .htm sites until either they migrate to corporate style or we implement something to replace this FPSE navigation.

10 weeks of high support traffic

LTT have been experiencing very high volumes of support queries during the autumn term as usage of some fantastic systems really does go sky high in user numbers. With over 20,000 downloads for the Listen Again service, and two new departments using Moodle this academic year, please bear with us as we adjust to new levels of support. We anticipate that support demand will continue to be high in the spring term.

9 TALIF projects

Ally from LTT will be sitting on the TALIF board reviewing nine finalists this term. This is a timely reminder that if a section of your bid relates to technology and interfacing with teams like WaLT then it’s best to discuss your needs long before the deadline.

8 letters in FEEDBACK

The Feedback Project: LTT are investigating ways to enhance the feedback and marking tools that are available to markers within OCS. An LTT blog will be coming in the new year when the specification has been refined, but thanks for all the ideas and comments over the last year from some of our super-users that have helped to shape the next wave of improvements.

7 days after deadline

A gentle reminder that students can submit an assignment in OCS up to 7 days after the deadline has passed. It occasionally happens that a student submits to the wrong assignment, and we get a request to move an assignment to the right folder, but this isn’t possible. So try and catch them early by allowing them to late submit.

6 outstanding web author issues

Please check the Support for Web Authors article that has recently been updated as of December with the current list of tips, solutions and ongoing issues with some aspects of web authoring.

5 new user groups

The Learning Technology Team have recently set up subscription email groups for users of the different tools we offer;  OCS, CMR, PRS, Moodle and Online Assessments. These email lists will be used for alerting users of changes to systems, occasional information regarding news or training and to ask for user input on any future developments.

Full story.

Sign up for one of these new mail groups:

4 4SW.3.3

Please note that the ISS Training Room is now numbered 4SW.3.3 (as opposed to 4S.3.3) – this change was brought in after the refurbishments downstairs (the room/door sign has also been changed).  You might use this room if you go on one of these ISS courses.

3 important letters: CSS

One of the biggest projects we are working on in WaLT at the moment is the CSS re-write. The website will look exactly the same, but the guts of how it is made up and structured will be changed to make it far easier to maintain and further develop.

2 departments in the corporate template

So far The Essex Business School (EBS) and Law are already in the corporate template. So when you get to their landing page www.essex.ac.uk/depts/ebs, it actually links into a corporate site, and doesn’t send you through to a differently designed set of pages. Over the coming months there will be a programme of moving departmental and other sites into the new corporate style. The timing for this is still to be finalised.

1 staff portal

A soft launch of the new staff portal took place last week. This was referred to in TopLines page – yes with me in the picture:/. Well done to Matt Palmer for all his hard work. I think you’ll agree it’s pretty snazzy-looking, and the widget possibilities and ideas are endless. I personally am looking forward to being able to update home addresses, and other HR information online. Feedback or suggestions? Email walt@essex.ac.uk

End note

Bite-size information more your thing? Follow us on twitter @Essex_WaLT.

Make sure any colleagues that use web services are signed up to web authoring updates by being on the webgroup mailing list. We won’t send out spam, and blogs are at a frequency of around one a month.


7 December 2011

Cookies

Filed under: News — Keith Brooke @ 2:38 pm

Earlier this year European law affecting use of cookies on websites changed, effectively making many uses of the technology illegal. In recognition of the challenges of implementing legislation that made ubiquitous web practices illegal, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (the UK Government department responsible for this law) has given institutions including universities a 12-month period in order to comply.

Guidance on what we can and should be doing is vague, at best, and here at the University of Essex we’re closely following what emerges as best practice to ensure that we are doing what is necessary to comply.

JISC Legal provide some good guidance on the latest thinking in their note,  Cookies – Six Months Until Enforcement.

Anyone running a webserver should check this to make sure that they comply. In particular, they should ensure that:

  1. their site’s privacy policy clearly explains the site’s use of cookies and other personal data;
  2. they have a good understanding of what cookies they use and how intrusive they are in terms of use and storage of personal data;
  3. what measures they can take to ensure that users can opt out from use of cookies, in particular the more intrusive ones.

Server-stable-Wednesday

Filed under: WaLT — Victoria Samways @ 9:31 am

Server-stable-Wednesday

On Wednesday 9th November we rolled out three significant changes to the new web server in the hope of stabilising its performance and tackling some of the more tricky web authoring issues.

Overview

1)     We reduced the size of the viewstate of the CTA bar (Call To Action bar, the red “Find a course/ Prospectus/Open Day/Get in Touch” bit).

2)     We removed fancy error trapping code that allowed ISS users to see more detail about any errors.

3)     We isolated all applications from the root of the website into their own little bubble.

Bit more info.

1)     The platform that we develop on is a .Net platform. Every time anyone (called a “Client”) browses to a page, a request was made to the server to provide them with all the information they might need from our databases to use the CTA bar, so for example providing all those countries in the drop down list if you would like to request Open Day information. What we’ve done now is store a cached version of the database, so every time you go to a corporate page the Client (you the user) doesn’t have to download tiny snippets of information in the background. With (and no we are not inflating our heads here) literally thousands of pages browsed a minute, this was a lot of communication between the server and the client, so sometimes the server just got a little stressed. This is now not the case.

2)     The extra super handy error messages that we got here in the office if something went down on the live website, was actually some old code that was used on the previous server, therefore not necessarily geared towards displaying what was wrong with this server, and potentially was trying to run code that wasn’t relevant to our new server and therefore was causing errors of its own. This is not a page you will have probably seen, it had a really lovely duck in one corner, and looked more like something out of The Matrix. It was very helpful and we will be re-creating one soon.

3)     So, if a website has some more pazazz to it – rather than just content-type pages, say it has some interactive forms, and certainly if it has its own MasterPage (design that is not the corporate style) then it will be its own application. If an application runs into technical problems, this can cause all other folders (formerly referred to as subwebs) to possibly error as well! Well that’s not very helpful, so now applications are in their own kind of pool so if they blow up, they are only taking themselves with them!

What has this meant?

1)     Well your experience as user will not change, if anything pages will load a few fractions of a second faster. But it does mean that all these requests don’t build up and kaboom the server.

2)     For you as a user again no change, and we’ve also put in place an automatic server reset script, so if the server does go down, within 30 seconds it (and all the other things that need to be reset) will be resuscitated.

3)     This really transpires that if one codey-type thing goes down, it doesn’t take the whole site with it, leaving us with a huge mess of exploded sites, when really it was one little site over there that had a problem. Why did we not do it this way before you ask? Well to cut a long story short, every time you make something into its own application you have to replicate certain files into that folder, and it was this repetition of files we were trying to get away from with the new servers.

Skip to the end…

The crux of it is:

  • The server is far more stable than when the new website first went live.
  • Some web authoring issues have been resolved as a result of changes in configuration, you should now be able to import files (in SharePoint Designer not just directly into a share) and also “Save As” a new page when you edit a current page and want to make a similar one.

Bitesize information more your thing? Follow us on twitter @Essex_WaLT

Make sure any colleagues that use web services are signed up to Web Authoring updates by being on the webgroup mailing list, we won’t send out spam, and blogs are at a frequency of around one a month.


21 November 2011

New WaLT Staff: Lina

Filed under: WaLT — Carolina Bailey @ 4:12 pm

Hi all!  I’m Carolina Bailey, otherwise known as Lina and I’m a Web Officer at WaLT.  I was added to the team to help with the launch of the new website, which was pretty much a trial by fire!!

I work part time here and part time at Essex Business School, did my degree here at the Computer Science and Electronic Engineering department and am still studying part time there in my spare time (whatever that is!) – so I get around campus quite a bit!

Although a scary introduction to the team – very stressed people in the office at that time! – I’ve really enjoyed meeting everyone, the giggles that break up the concentration and of course, the sweetie table!!  It has also been mentioned that there can’t be another office in the world that has a crocodile with a beard as part of the décor…

The WaLT team are an amazing bunch who do immense work to keep the website and related systems all ticking over nicely (with only the occasional panic…!).  It’s been an honour to be part of the new website launch!


3 October 2011

New website and servers

Filed under: Newsletter,web review 2011 — Tags: — Keith Brooke @ 5:13 am

Just before 6am today, we switched over to the new webservers and the new University of Essex website went live.

It’s been a major effort by staff across the University, but particularly in CER and ISS. In the last few weeks, WaLT have had people working long days and through weekends to meet the very challenging deadline of Monday, week 1.

Today the WaLT team will be working in shifts. Five of us have been in since before 4am for the switchover; the rest will be in to cover normal office hours, allowing the early starters to collapse in a heap in the corner. (Special acknowledgement to Alex, who came in at 4am on her birthday!)

Please do bear with us if responses are a bit slow during the next few days: not only have we gone live with a new site and new server infrastructure, but it’s also a peak time for user support with the academic year starting and new students arriving.

We’ve provided some further information for web authors on a restricted-access page on our web support site.


19 September 2011

Still on track, but it’s going to be close

Filed under: News,Newsletter,web review 2011 — Keith Brooke @ 10:00 am

We’re all working flat out on the new website now, with two weeks to go until launch.

It’s going to be close, and pretty much every working hour has been scheduled for the entire team. With a timeframe like the one we were set it was always going to be like this, though. No breathing space, no leeway… In fact, it’s quite staggering that we are on track, given the amount of slippage we’ve been faced with (mainly down to late templates, and the amount of changes we’ve had to make to those templates in order to get them to do what we want).

What are the implications for audience and web authors here at the University?

  • There will inevitably be a lot of rough edges when we go live, simply because there hasn’t been as much time for checking as we’d like. Please do report anything that looks broken to walt@essex.ac.uk, but do please bear in mind that we would always expect a surge in feedback/requests when a new site goes live, so we may be slow to respond!
  • Similarly, corporate areas of the new site have a new navigation system which we’ll be refining post-launch. In particular, this will involve merging links currently in sites’ lefthand navigation with those in their righthand panels. If web authors responsible for parts of the corporate site feel that their navigation needs tweaking after we’ve done this they should get in touch, but again, we may be slow to respond.
  • Web authoring: as well as the visual and structural changes for the new site, all web pages hosted on www.essex.ac.uk are being migrated onto new hardware infrastructure. In the days before this switchover, web authors are being locked out of their sites on the old server to allow us to migrate copies of their sites to the new server, without these new copies falling out of synch with the versions currently live. Reinstating editing after the 3 October launch will be carried out as quickly as possible, but won’t be instant. There may also be issues with working on the new infrastructure which will emerge when web authors are let loose. These will be tackled as a priority, but again, we may be slow to respond. Again, this isn’t ideal, but we’re doing our best!
  • We’re doing our best to preserve as many established URLs as possible, but it’s inevitable that pages will be moved or removed. Most of the changed URLs will be in what is currently the prospective students’ area, but there will be other changes too. We aim to produce a list of significant URL changes closer to going live, to help web authors update their links.

The support we’ve had from others around the University while we’ve been working on this project has been fantastic, and is very much appreciated. Not long to go!


25 August 2011

A new website for October

Filed under: News,Newsletter,web review 2011 — Keith Brooke @ 8:52 am

At the start of October the University will launch its new website, a collaboration between Web and Learning Technology, Communications and External Relations and external consultants Headscape.

Development version of new home page

One of the key drivers for this new development is the changing environment for student finance and recruitment, and so the new site will be more externally focused, and primarily aimed at student recruitment. The new site will fit more closely into the University’s brand, and will make prominent features of high quality imagery and video; a new version of the Course Finder, extended to cover PG taught and PG research opportunities, will be supplemented by scholarship and fee finders; and there will be a range of other new and improved features.

At the same time as developing the new site, major work is taking place to migrate www.essex.ac.uk onto new server infrastructure, with significant improvements in speed, resilience and scalability.

This all means that we have a lot of Big Things happening All At Once…

Just to complicate matters further, a combination of delays beyond our control, unanticipated extra work and staff illness (pressure much?) means that, while we’re still on target, we’re getting increasingly squeezed as the deadline approaches.

Implications for the internal audience include:

  • Things will move! With such a major rewrite of the University website it’s inevitable that links to existing pages will be broken. We will, of course do our best to minimise this: we’ll provide a guide to new locations to help web authors update links (links most likely to be changed include those pointing to pages for prospective students and about the University); we’ll provide automatic redirects on key pages and informative error messages for the rest; and we’ll run automated checks for broken links to alert web authors. It would also be helpful to web authors if you would inform them whenever you find a link that is broken.
  • From now until October we have a rolling programme of migrating existing sites onto the new servers. Web authors whose sites are hosted on the www.essex.ac.uk server will find that when their site is moved there will be a period where they will have no editing access; this is necessary as site migration is a laborious process and all sites can’t be moved at the last minute.

What to do if you’re a web author

  • We know it’s a horribly busy time of the year (we didn’t choose the deadline!), but at the start of October please try to set aside some time to update links on your site.
  • As sites on www.essex.ac.uk are migrated to the new server we will block editing access to the copies that remain on the old server, so authors of these sites will find a time, particularly in September, when they have no editing access. Please try to schedule your work around this and if there are any problems do contact us at walt@essex.ac.uk. We will communicate directly with those affected.

 

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