We love working with
SUN – Space Universities Network
One of our projects for Bristol University, SUN is a site and organisation that brings together academics and industry research in the world of space.
SUN’s mission is to help “learning and teaching by providing support and resources to the UK higher education space science and engineering community”.
Our job was to upgrade their site, to make the structure correct and most of all to ensure that SUN have the tools and resources to extend their network of Industry and Academia.
BOLDLY GOING…
Design was evolution rather than revolution. We edged their logo towards a new design, simplified the structure and added some amazing videos.
Old site
The previous site screenshots below are unrecognisable bar the logo (we weren’t allowed to change). The structure was rather different too, but most of the content is the same.
Under the Hood
This site is built on Bristol University’s WordPress ecosystem. As such a lot of our usual tools and toys were not available to us. It is WordPress and Divi but some of our other “goodies” we use for SEO, for optimisation and for monitoring were not.
A good exercise in working around and validating our usual practices.
We are proud of…
Our strategy for creating a network
The old site had an email signup list via JISC (A university enabled emailing list provider) as well as your more standard member login on the site. This meant manual duplication of adding and approving members as well as users having two sets of things to sign up to.
Our solution was to keep the JISC mailing list and to use more of their functionally, so any “secret” non-public files are accessed via JISC. This means one route for signup and no user data being stored on the Bristol servers, where we were very keep to keep the site. We did a lot of work to come up with scenarios but this was the simplest, easiest to implement and there the best – KISS!