Web and Emerging Technologies
Techical Services / University IT / What We Do / Web and Emerging Technologies
Web and Emerging Technologies
The Web Team provides a specialist, comprehensive service, offering guidance and support in the following key areas:
- Accessibility and usability
- Content management
- Social media
- Tools
- Web design
- Website search engine optimisation
The Web Team brings together creative, strategic and technical specialists to provide a comprehensive web service, offering everything from editorial advice, statistics analysis, search engine optimisation (SEO), to training and development.
The team lead in the development and provision of a wide range of innovative systems and services, by building on our current information resources, content and services to maximise the availability of opportunities for individual attainment and success throughout our academic community.
The team works closely with all faculties and services, such as Marketing and Recruitment, to deliver the visual identity and development of all web-based University services.
The Web Team maintains a number of web based services, including:
| Service | Notes |
|---|---|
| Terminalfour | The University content management system (CMS) |
| Funnelback | The University search engine |
| Course Database | Population and delivery of course content for web sites |
| My Sunderland | The staff and student intranet which is built using Confluence |
| wwwadmin | Tools to populate databases and web sites |
| Mobile | Mobile versions of web content and systems |
| Google Analytics | Website usage and statistics |
| OpenAthens | Central authentication (single sign-on) and e-resource access |
| EzProxy | Off campus e-resource access |
| Helix Media Library | The University video streaming service |
| Feedback | System to enable staff and students to report problems and feedback related to our web provision |
| WordPress | The University platform for blogs and microsites |
| Pingdom and Rapid Spike | Website performance and monitoring tool |
Our Services
We provide a specialist, comprehensive web service, offering guidance and support in the following key areas:
Accessibility and Usability
The Web Team is committed to making the University of Sunderland web presence accessible to all users. Various steps have been taken to ensure the website conforms to current standards of accessibility. All new design templates and elements have been tested for usability to ensure the best user experience.
Content Management
A content management system (CMS) is a software system which provides website authoring and administration tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of web languages to create and manage site content.
The Web Team work with faculties and services to support them in using our CMS and provide training to allow web managers and editors to use the CMS as efficiently as possible.
Terminalfour is the University CMS. Features include:
- Content authoring, advanced editing tools to facilitate content creation, content control and editing
- Navigation management, dynamic and consistent navigation, site maps, breadcrumbs
- Publishing workflows, create customized workflows, apply a fast and transparent review-and release process to online content. Redlining function highlights changes to web pages and combined with automated escalation rules, changes are routed to the designated review person via email notifications
- Digital asset management, document and rich media in a central and secure location
- Store images used on your website in a central location where they can be easily retrieved and modified. Make quick modifications, like cropping and resizing easily then adjust your images throughout your website.
Web Design
The Web Team offer advice and support to staff and students in the following areas:
- HTML (and HTML5)
- CSS (and CSS3)
- jQuery
- Flash and rich media
- Multimedia and video
- Use of imagery
- Image manipulation
- Application design and development
- Social media styling
- Best practice
- Accessibility and usability
- Identifying site audiences
- Website planning the structure
- User training
- Testing
Website Search
The University website can be searched from any page, using the search box in the global navigation menu. We use Funnelback, which means we can filter out results that are not relevant, in addition to promoting results that we think might be helpful.
The following sites are indexed:
- www.sunderland.ac.uk and any website within this domain