University of Sunderland won Gold for the ‘Best Website’ at the 2018 Heist Awards, and thanks to this success the web team have been in high demand.
Technical Services’ web team have been helping other University departments redevelop some of their webpages, including the ‘Arts and Creative Industries’ course webpages. The user is the priority. Ensuring that anyone who visits the page will have a positive experience, and that it performs well, loads quickly, and that students from all over the world can access it.
The web team have also helped improve how mobile friendly the site is. On a smart phone the webpage now looks better than it has previously, load quicker, and if you are not accessing it on Wi-Fi it will not use up as much of your mobile data as the previous version did.
A host of other ‘behind the scenes’ features were added to the webpage templates to allow Technical Services to monitor users as and when they access the website so we can be proactive and resolve issues before they have time to impact the user. An example of this is, the web team would receive an alert if a large image has been uploaded which will slow down what is shown on the page. This was achieved by using a number of coding techniques such as lazy loading and technical tools.
The new website templates have been designed using our new modular design system which then allows these templates to be cascaded across the whole web estate.