Wednesday, August 19, 2009

StudentNET Pre-registration Portal launches

We have today launched Canterbury Christ Church University's StudentNET Pre-registration portal. It was launched to support the registration event for our students-to-be. Although it is a simple concept of collecting information about our students prior to their arrival, the developments required input from several departments from across the University.

Students are given the opportunity to complete various tasks within this portal, which include
  • Confirm your place
  • Upload your photo
  • Submit your email address
  • Activate your computing account
  • Get your arrival instructions
The role of the portal was to bring seamlessly together several different systems which are used by our users to complete the tasks above, with a view to further integration next year.

The portal also utilises the University's knowledgebase system by presenting the students with top questions and answers that have been asked by others and also giving them an opportunity to query the knowledgebase should they have other questions about the registration event.

All in-house built applications within this portal, such as the photo upload facility, have web service driven context help fed by our Content Management System on each page to guide students through step-by-step. After several years experience of building online applications, we have found that it does not matter how intuitive you think your pages are, it is always better to guide your users with appropriate help.

All we can do now it has been launched, is to monitor the use of it and if necessary amend the help content and faqs.

Monday, August 03, 2009

StudentNET gets a facelift

From August 12th, StudentNET will receive a facelift. This development will bring all StudentNET applications one step closer towards the final product that will be launched in the late Autumn term.

Our designer has widened the layout to 960px to provide space for a flexible yet structural 12 column grid on the page. We have also freshened up the header by intensifying the StudentNET orange colour while matching it closely to our corporate colour palette. The footer has also seen some attention. It has been tidied up into clear, categorised columns with scope to add a large number of links.

From a development point of view, we have introduced forms authentication to fall in line with external IT products that our students use, such as WebMail and BlackBoard. We introduced context help for each page which is fed by our Content Management System and centralised common error pages which also allow for student feedback should an error occur.

We would love to hear any feedback you might have. So please leave a comment!