STRETCHING THE TARTAN

Scottish Web Folk Conference 2025

Thursday 30 October 2025. A conference tailored for university web, digital, and marketing teams

09:00	Breakfast in the Dalhousie Building foyer
	09:30-12:00 Lecture theatre 3
09:30	Opening
09:45	Andrew Millar University of Dundee Never waste a crisis Talk
10:15	Keynote Acquia The future of websites in the era of AI
10:45	Comfort Break
11:00	Supplier '30sec' pitches
11:20	Panel discussion
12:00	Lunch
	Track one - Lecture theatre 3	Track two - 1F01	Track three - 2G12	Track four - 2G13
13:00	University of Dundee and Acquia Rethinking Search: Helping Higher Ed optimise for AI & LLMs Workshop Join the Acquia SEO and the University of Dundee teams for an engaging workshop that explores the essentials of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) in an era where AI is disrupting search.	Little Forest Managing ‘web archaeology’	Remarkable From Clicks to Conversations: Designing for the Agentic Student of Tomorrow	Hayhurst & Co Workshop Stretching the tartan without snapping it…a survivor’s guide to burnout prevention in Higher Education.
13:00		Jennifer Doyle University of Edinburgh Governance of programme content	Numiko Whose website is this anyway? – Distinctiveness in university website design. Why do all university websites look the same, and does it matter? This session explores how universities can capture what makes them unique to differentiate themselves online and truly stand out to prospective students.
14:00	Comfort Break
14:15	Squiz Students Don't Speak University": Building Conversational AI for Digital Natives	Pathways Where’s the value? Prospective students face uncertainty and are quick to question marketing spin. They expect transparency. This session shows how real data on student choices, outcomes, and demand can cut through scepticism, build trust, and demonstrate value.	Brendan Vaughan University of Limerick How multiple converging crises helped us gain investment from upper management to increase capacity in our central team and help migrate hundreds of sites into one system.	Emma Horrell University of Edinburgh UX led experiments with AI
14:45	Zengenti Make the most of your human intelligence with AI Rather than let AI (or team members with access to AI) run rampant and create unsupervised off-brand and potentially inaccurate content, use well-governed AI to carry out the mundane tasks and free up your expert team to do the work they do best, and which helps you stand out from the crowd.	Cues.ai Beyond pageviews: how university site channels collaborate - and why we misread the data Based on a statistically robust dataset from multiple institutional analytics sources, this talk uncovers how your site’s channels work together to attract and keep engaged audiences.	Neil Allison University of Edinburgh Hypothesis led content design	Kris Purdy University of Glasgow Storefronts to student services - omnichannel for HE
15:15	Tea / Coffee break
15:45	Terminalfour Case study from Middlesex University on their digital transformation project	Manifesto Doing More With Less What can Spotify, charities, and the culture sector teach universities? Discover a new digital playbook to solve the engagement and efficiency crisis.	Nick Daniels and Katie Spearman University of Edinburgh Rethinking content design training at scale	Ammad Rehman Edinburgh Napier University SEO for HE
16:15	Prospectus Plus The Big Green Quiz – Sustainability in HE Marketing	Headscape When your brand doesn't fit: managing institutional misfits Designing a school site with a different character to its counterparts. How to extend a visual identity to allow for differences while remaining true to the overall brand. Plus a bonus look at how design systems are finally delivering on a 20 year old promise	Alistair Quinn University of East Anglia UEA's journey from Monolithic to Serverless using AWS and Storyblok to improve performance and global reach	Sonia Virdi, Katie Spearman and Stratos Filalithis University of Edinburgh Taking a human approach to web governance
	16:45-17:00 Lecture theatre 3
16:45	Andrew Millar University of Dundee Closing conference talk
17:00	Networking event at Dukes Corner

Thursday 30 October 2025, 09:00-17:00 with a networking event afterwards

Scottish Web Folk is an extraordinary day of collaboration and inspiration at a conference tailored for university web, digital, and marketing teams looking to enhance their digital strategies.

Starting as a full-day conference in November 2023 for Scotland only, we then expanded to the wider UK and Ireland in November 2024. Most recently we have attracted 170 attendees from 27 education institutions and 12 corporate sponsors.

Our conference theme this year is "Stretching the tartan: Never waste a crisis".

Higher Education is in a time of trouble and it has never been more important for us to drive process and budget efficiencies. The conference will be focusing on real stories from institutions where they're doing things differently along with their successes (and failures).

You'll hear from commercial partners and how they've worked with a wide variety of clients to solve real world issues.

This conference remains free for members of Scottish Higher Education institutions, but a fee of £50 will be charged for others.