Creating a project

Project content type

A project is a collaborative activity relating to research, public engagement, or a University service.  

The reasons for including projects on the University website are varied. You should use the project content type if you need to:

• show prospective students and/or staff our research activity
• provide evidence to funding bodies or reviewers such as those working on the REF
• show the phases of a public engagement project

Don’t use the project content type if the purpose of the content is to:

• provide a detailed account of research impact (use Story)
• tell a public interest story which is expected to have engagement beyond its publication date (use Story)

Project dates and type

As it is a discrete block of work, a project needs to be given a start date, and an end date where appropriate. 

You must also give it a status, either:

• Active

or

• Completed  (the project has finished but there is a user need or business requirement to continue to show the project information and associated outputs) 

Writing a project title and summary

It is unlikely that you will be able to change the project title as this needs to match up to the name it has officially been given.  However, you should provide its title in full.

A project summary should tell the reader what the project is about and either what it is hoping to achieve or what it has already achieved if completed. You should consider how the summary will show up in search engine results.

Writing project content

In your description of the project, you should explain what the project is about and why it was undertaken, what it is aiming to do, and how it intends to achieve this. If necessary, this can be separated out into distinct phases. If the content is lengthy, subheadings can help to break up the material.

If the project is already completed, you should state what the impact of the project has been.

You can make the project visually appealing and provide extra depth to it by adding a featured image, callouts for quotes, video, and galleries of images associated with it.

Call to action

Add a call to action button when there is something you would like a user to do after reading the information. This could be to find out more on a dedicated project website or to participate in the project.

Outputs

Where projects have outputs associated with them, you can include downloads directly on the page.

Funding

Funding bodies often require that their support is recognised online. You can include the names of these and also choose whether to give a project a monetary value.

Taxonomies for project content

We use taxonomies in content types to organise content, publish it to different locations, and give it meaning so people can find it easily. Taxonomies take the form of assignable categories or tags.  

Below are the project taxonomies that an editor should use.

Featured group

When you choose a ‘featured group’, your project summary will be published on the relevant group’s project feed – this is usually a School or discipline. You can choose more than one group.  For example you might choose “Centre for Water Law, Policy and Science” and “Geography and Environmental Science” if the project was a collaboration between the two disciplines. This means you only need to create a project once and it can be reused wherever appropriate. 

Project type

You can choose whether the project is a:

• public engagement project
• research project or
• University project

A University project would be something like a new IT service or a building project on campus.

Project lead and project team

Projects can be associated with one or more people. This will give us the option in future updates to the CMS to automatically publish a link to the project on the staff member’s profile page.

You can also add any external members of your project team.  These will not be linked to anywhere else. If you need to add a member of staff who no longer works for the University of Dundee, you can do so here.

Related content

If the project is part of a wider series of projects, you can link to up to three other items of content in the ‘related content’ section. 

Resources for writing project content

The University content style guide provides guidance for editors to ensure consistency of style across all University of Dundee content. It includes information about:

• Content principles
• Voice and tone
• Writing guidelines
• Reference manual for Grammar, spelling, formatting and University of Dundee terminology