About the HESA website

Welcome to the HESA website!

We hope that you like the new look of our website, but the changes we've made go deeper than that.

The new site is designed to be modern, easy to navigate and to meet the needs of our users. We've re-organised the site to make it easy for you to get to the content you need as quickly as possible. The largest change in this area has been in coding manuals. We've brought together all the information for each collection onto one page, so that you won't have to navigate between disparate resources. However, we hope you'll find all sections of the site easier to get around.

The new HESA website has been designed with web accessibility in mind. At present our site complies with the W3C priority 1 web accessibility guidelines. It will be a goal of the HESA web team to push this further and comply with the priority 2 and 3 guidelines in the future. The site should be compatible with all popular screen readers, and for those users who require larger fonts, the site will scale nicely when the font size is increased.

To achieve this, we have completely overhauled our site to use a Content Management System, in this particular case a well-known open source application called Joomla! This allows HESA staff to publish information to those that need it quicker and more easily than ever before.

We are also committed to using standards-compliant markup on our website. As part of this commitment, we recommend the use of a standards-compliant browser to view the site, such as Mozilla Firefox, although we have tested the site in many different browsers.

We will be discontinuing the Management Information Tables and HOLIS Compare from the 1st of September 2007 because of the innovative new heidi service. heidi is a web-based management information service that provides easy access to a rich source of quantitative data about higher education.

Finally, we have introduced an RSS feed for the HESA website. This will allow users to be notified of any new website content without having to check the site. If you're not sure what this is, then read this useful article explaining RSS .

Changes to coding manuals

Coding manuals are now organised by collection. All the resources you will need for a collection are now located on a single page for that collection. These can be accessed by using the 'stream' links down the right hand side, then choosing a collection from the list which appears. You will then be taken to a page which lists all the resources for that collection. For an example, have a look at the C06011 Student Collection 2006/07.

Coming Soon

We do not plan to make any structural or feature changes to the website in the first few months after launch in order to give time for people to become familiar with the site and also to allow for sufficient feedback to guide us on future changes. However we do already have plans to add on-line ordering and payments for our products, services and seminars during 2009.

Your feedback

We need to know what you think of the new site, if there's anything extra you'd like to see, and, if you do encounter any problems, we'd like to know what went wrong. Please email us any feedback .

Thanks, and we hope you enjoy browsing the new site.