I have an admission to make... things have been a little quiet on the advocate front since arriving back from Australia a few weeks back. Mea Culpa, I’ve been a little busy…

In what I believe is a first for the UK HE sector (I am willing to be set straight however), the University of Salford has today unveiled it’s new beta website at beta.salford.ac.uk. The old one’s still there for the moment but we’re encouraging visitors to check out our new brand and tell us what they think before we go to final release next month.

The beta concept was something I was a bit wary of to be honest. I'm used to delivering websites that are finished and complete. But I do like the idea that we're being a little brave in expanding out our user testing in such a public way. I'm looking forward to reporting back on that experience in a future post.

So, it's not quite finished and stuff might break but go on, have a squiz (sorry, couldn’t resist).

There’s so many cool new features here including our Funnelback-powered course and site search, a neat course comparison feature (another HE-first?), country-customised international content, events booking and much much more. We're also working on some responsive design for a special mobile version of the site for final launch.

The team from SquizUK and Funnelback have developed some wonderful user-focused functionality and I’m looking forward to presenting some of that in more detail at future Squiz events.

We were also thrilled to get our hands on the new Funnelback WCAG Compliance Auditor for the tail end of the project. We had limited time to do testing and this fantastic tool has allowed us to do a lot in a short space of time. I wouldn’t dream of building a website without it now.

A huge thanks go out to the wonderful team I work with at Salford who pulled some very late nights to get us to our delivery date.

But the last few weeks haven’t all been about beta.

I’ve been in touch with Community legends Nic Hubbard and Duncan Robertson recently and we’ve some talked about some quick wins that we’ll hopefully be unleashing soon on  community.squiz.net.

I’m also happy to be handing over the keys to a couple of guest bloggers very soon who have some great stories to tell about their community experiences. I’m very keen to make that a regular thing so if you are interested in contributing, please get in touch.

Now, I should really catch up on some sleep.