Showcasing Keele’s world-leading research

The new Keele University website research pages have now gone live!

During our planning phase we found that the old research pages had a confusing structure, with multiple routes to find research institutes, centres and groups, and school-based research. The pages also did not showcase our world-leading research to its full potential.

Our new mobile-friendly research pages have addressed these challenges. Research is now front and centre of the website, with a clearer focus on our research institutes and centres. We have also introduced a new searchable research A-Z that makes finding school-based research, and research groups, easier. In addition, new Research and Innovation Support Enhancement (RaISE) pages have gone live, and are receiving positive feedback.

The new research pages have a SEO score of 100%, and an accessibility score of 79% (Google Chrome Audit). The mobile load time on 3G is also rated as ‘Good’ at 4 seconds — which is 50% quicker than the old pages.

Next steps

As we continue to transform school sections (more on that shortly), we will focus on mirroring school-based research content onto the school pages, to make it more integrated. The research A-Z will of-course continue to direct users to these pages. Also, once we have confirmed web champions in each of the three new research institutes then we will support the transfer of their content onto the new website templates too. The team will also support the development of a new set of ‘public engagement with research’ pages which are being developed separately.

A few other project updates

• We said farewell to Chris Hicks, who was with us for a year as Web Content Manager. Our central project team is back to Paul Newton, Chris Beard and Galina Smith, supported by local Web Champions in schools and directorates, etc (see who our Web Champions are here). If you need to get in touch, please email support.web@keele.ac.uk.
• We’re currently working with the following schools on the transformation of their web pages: Law, GGE, Chemical and Physical Sciences, Nursing and Midwifery, and SPIRE. We’re also about to get started with Life Sciences, and the School of Humanities.
• We’ve given renewed attention on fixing broken links on the website, with a decrease over the last few weeks of almost 1,000 ‘404’ error pages.