We spoke with Mark Kennedy, web development manager at Ulster University, about delivering the best brand proposition possible.
Ulster University’s ‘mini-agency’
“I manage the web development team and we sit within the creative services team here at Ulster. The creative services team has designers, developers, videographers, photographers and marketing/communications people. It’s like a mini agency within the University.
The creative services team is responsible for delivering the University’s brand proposition. We do everything from the websites to social media graphics, leaflets, T-shirts, and anything that touches the brand.
The creative services team is one of four departments within the marketing and communications directorate. We have strategic marketing, which does a lot of our course recruitment and looking at industry statistics. Then we have PR and communications, your traditional brand guardians of the university. In terms of what are people saying about us out there and what are we saying about ourselves.
Then we have the special projects team and they deal with things that aren’t necessarily Ulster University exclusive projects. So there will be a lot of partnerships and regional things that are going on. For example, our Jordan’s Town campus has just become the Ulster University sports village. It is a multimillion-pound complex that will be a centre for sporting excellence. Premiership rugby teams and the international soccer team train there.”
What are your teams’ specific responsibilities in terms of the website?
“When I first joined in 2016 the major part of our work was to consolidate all of the web and digital touch points onto our current platform which is called Squizz Matrix.
That project took the best part of two to three years. We now have roughly 15,000 pages which being looked after by Silktide.
A series of core templates, style sheets and components drive everything. Squizz is quite good from the point of view that we have developed these core elements which all our content editors have been trained on. This ensures that nobody can go ‘off-piste’.
My role is to ensure we have full governance of the platform so nobody can publish unless it gets approved by our team through our workflow.
We will do development and we’ll build out solutions on the website, but my team doesn’t publish content. We have an army of content editors in schools, departments, faculties, and research areas that publish and look after their own content.”
What prompted you to purchase Silktide?
“We had aimed to be fully WCAG compliant during the move to Squizz but it was initially the drive for accessibility wasn’t as strong as I liked it to be.
However, we have an equality, diversity and inclusion committee in the University and they have an interest in accessibility, so we started reaching out to them to say we are taking this seriously.
We did a few training sessions, initially around PDFs, and they bought into the idea to help us. This helped get further buy-in from senior leadership because they understood what we were trying to do and why we were trying to do it.
The government were saying that everybody needs to be WCAG compliant but we were not. So we needed to do something about it because if we got a tap on the shoulder, we wouldn’t have a leg to stand on.
The impetus was to make sure, as a government organisation, that we were complying and if the Government Digital Services came to audit us we would be in good shape.”
What were you doing before you got Silktide?
“We had a product, called Funnelback, that was part of the Squizz Matrix platform which did a lot of the WCAG checks. It was really powerful, however it wasn’t very user-friendly so we weren’t able to give this to the content editors.
Silktide on the other hand is very user-friendly and gives us the in-depth kind of feedback we need. Plus Silktide has a lot more to offer in addition to accessibility, such as the checks around content.
Funnelback was pretty technical so we were just trying the best we could with it. It wasn’t until we got Silktide that we were able to zero in on the areas of the website that needed fixing.”
How did you hear about Silktide?
“It was part of our market research. We looked at SITEIMPROVE® but that proved to be too much in terms of what we wanted. We looked at Monsido but decided not to go with them. We went through a process and Silktide was the one we chose. It might have initially been brought to our attention due to the Silktide Index.”
How do you use Silktide?
“We had so many issues at the start our approach was to focus on specific checks and flatten that specific issue.
We would look at any issues that appeared on multiple pages but were caused by a template or component issue. That way we might have had 10,000 errors on contrast caused by a component. If we fix that component then we fix 10,000 errors in one go.
It was a case of interrogating what Silktide was telling us and then going for the low-hanging fruit and attacking those issues. When those were crushed, we got to a point where we could see any error spikes.
One of the things we do is test our templates before release. That way we can minimize potential issues but we then have Silktide as the safety net.
Now that the major issues have been cleared we can spot any new ones creeping in and get them fixed straight away.”
What results did you get with Silktide?
“When we initially started with Silktide we were sitting around the seventy position on the Silktide Index.
It has taken a lot of hard work and dedication from the team but I’m pleased to say that we are currently number one in the Index with an accessibility score of 99%
It is a real testament to my team as the Index is independent of any checks that are overridden in a user’s account so is a purer reflection of how good our web accessibility is.”
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