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Warwick Medical School

Guidance: Managing a student-led activity website

Thanks for taking the time to read through our web guidance. We’re really pleased you’ve decided to set up a website for your society/club and are here to help you with it however we can. The key for website management is to make sure your digital presence is professional, informative, and accessible. And importantly, once set up and live we need to make sure it’s kept up to date and that permissions are updated as and when committee membership changes. Have a read through the information below and if you have any questions at all please drop us a line at wms.comms@warwick.ac.uk.

First steps

Before you start working on the website please familiarise yourself with the following:

GDPR


It’s really important that you make sure your work on the website is compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation. In particular, you should make sure you have obtained written consent from anyone featured in the images used on your site (for that specific purpose) or when you have used any other personal information (such as email addresses). Please read through these pages.

Accessibility


As a public sector institution, we need to make sure that all of our digital services are accessible to everyone. Please read through these guidelines and make sure you adhere to them when working on the website.

How to use SiteBuilder


SiteBuilder is the university’s content management system, set up to allow any member of the Warwick community to edit webpages without prior web experience or knowledge of coding. Once you’ve been given access to edit your website you should see an ‘Edit’ option in the top right hand side of your screen (when logged in).

ITS have put together a helpful set of guidance articles on their site here to take you through the basics of editing your pages.

Adding content to your website

A basic template has been set up for you which should include space for all the important information you’ll want to share with your members and prospective members. If there are extra subpages you’d like to add to your website please get in touch with the WMS Marketing and Communications team.

Imagery

When choosing imagery for your website please make sure you have the written permission of anyone featured in your photos (and explicitly for use on this website). If you are looking for stock imagery we would recommend the following royalty-free sites, whose photos you don't need permission to use:

You shouldn’t just take images straight from Google image search as there are often copyright issues around this.

Homepage
The slideshow banner

The banner at the top of your website is a great place to feature key information about your society to catch people’s attention, and to highlight any important upcoming events. The images on the slideshow should be cropped to 1175 px x 375px. If you don’t already have image editing software on your computer you could use GIMP to help with this.

What we do box

In this box, write a brief overview of your society, the types of activities you offer and why students might want to join. This only needs to be a short introduction as we have set you up another ‘About us’ page where you can go into more detail. To make sure the box doesn’t become too stretched compared to the other two on the homepage we would suggest keeping your text here to a maximum of around 100 words.

Events box

The events box pulls its content through from the main student events calendar here. The template you have been set up will be pulling through the next three events from any WMS MB ChB society/ club. To change this you just need to make sure your events are listed on the events calendar and with a relevant tag for your society. Then, when you go into the edit screen for your homepage and go to ‘Settings’ in the events box you should see an option to ‘Enter tag names’. Once your society’s tag has been added you should find that the next three events for your society will show automatically in the box. Email wms.comms@warwick.ac.uk if you get stuck on this.

How to use SiteBuilder

Use this box to include links to your society’s social media accounts, Teams groups, contact email addresses and anything else you think might be relevant.

Subpages

There are two standard subpages included on our society webpages but more can be added if needed (for example if you’d like to have a dedicated webpage for an event you’re running.)

About

This page offers you more space to provide extra information about your society, activities and benefits for members. You could include information about past events and photos (if you have permission). This page can be made public

Meet the committee

We’d recommend including a brief bio of the members of your committee and how each person contributes to the group. As always, please obtain written consent for any photos or personal information you use (like email addresses) and make sure this page is updated whenever there is a change of committee members.

Setting your website live and finding it on the WMS site

Once all of your content has been added, please contact wms.comms@warwick.ac.uk and we’ll make your site live. Please note that by default it will only be open to members of the Warwick community (staff and students) - members of the public will not be able to access it. Certain pages can be made public If you need them to be (perhaps for a public event or to advertise your society for external funding). Please contact us on the email address above if this is the case. Your society page will be linked from the relevant MB ChB Current Students ‘Societies, networks and sports clubs’ page.

Keeping your website up to date

It’s important to keep your website up to date, particularly when there are changes in the committee or new upcoming events. Website maintenance could be one of the responsibilities of one or several of your committee members. If you need to give other people editing permissions on the site, please email wms.comms@warwick.ac.uk.