Project: School of Nursing and Midwifery Website Rebuild Project – Digital Transformation Initiative

Description

In 2016, Dr Matt Birch led a comprehensive School of Nursing and Midwifery Website Rebuild Project as part of Queen’s University Belfast’s broader Digital Transformation efforts, aimed at modernising digital platforms to enhance the experience of students, staff, and external stakeholders. This initiative aligned with the University’s institutional focus on developing digital capabilities, improving research and teaching visibility, and supporting cultural change in how digital platforms are used for engagement and communication.

Dr Birch’s role encompassed the end-to-end redevelopment of the School’s public-facing website, including project scoping, stakeholder engagement, information architecture design, content strategy, user experience optimisation, and technical integration. The project involved consolidating static, fragmented content into a single cohesive framework, ensuring accessibility and responsiveness across devices, and introducing navigation that reflected contemporary expectations for digital interaction. In parallel, Dr Birch oversaw the alignment of the School’s social media presence with the new site, ensuring consistent branding, messaging, and cross-platform engagement mechanisms.

Throughout the rebuild, Dr Birch worked closely with academic colleagues, administrators, and professional service units to gather requirements, map key user journeys, and prioritise content that supported recruitment, programme information, research visibility, and community engagement. The site’s overhaul included refreshed imagery, structural improvement of key programme pages, integration of news and events feeds, and enhanced search functionality to support discoverability.

The redesigned site served as a critical interface for both internal and external audiences, improving navigation for prospective students, current learners, alumni, and research partners. This activity demonstrated the School’s commitment to digital-first communication practices and contributed to an enhanced institutional profile online. Within the context of Queen’s University’s strategic ambition to evolve digital capability and cultural practice, this project represented a significant local transformation that supported broader University objectives of modernising digital presence and improving user experience.

The success of the Nursing and Midwifery website transformation was evident in increased engagement metrics, positive feedback from academic and professional colleagues, and its ongoing use as a base for content related to research outputs, student support resources, and public engagement. This activity supported Queen’s University Belfast Strategy 2030 priorities around Education and Skills, Our People, and the Technology enabler by investing in digital infrastructure that enhanced visibility, accessibility, and institutional communication. It also aligned with SDG 4 (Quality Education) by improving access to educational information and SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure) through sustainable digital practice.

Period	01 Jan 2016 → 31 Dec 2016
Held at	School of Nursing and Midwifery
Degree of Recognition	Local