As Mosaic approaches end of life, teams across the University are migrating their websites to Fresco. To shine a light on the process in practice, we spoke to Mathilde Pascal, who has just completed the migration journey with her site from Mosaic to Fresco.
Continue reading for her thoughts on the migration journey, the support available, and how she’s finding Fresco now.
What support did you have during the migration?
I think it was well organised. First, there was a pre-migration meeting that everyone gets invited to, which gave an idea of what was going to happen, what to pay attention to, and an introduction to Fresco. That was useful.
Once someone got in touch about the actual date for the migration and signing the forms, there was a clear point of contact and regular check-ins, and I knew who to ask questions to. If I had a question, I could just write to them, and they replied quickly. They’re really good.
When you raised issues or suggestions, how were they handled?
When I gave feedback on things that weren’t working or could work better, it was all taken into account by the migration team. They also put improvement requests to the Fresco development team, so it’s good to have that support.
Did anything about the process surprise you?
When I first started looking into the migration, I got the impression that a lot of the work would have to be done beforehand. Actually, most of the work had to be done afterwards, after the migration, just to fix things.
Especially because we had some custom CSS code, there were some elements that weren’t working very well yet. So, it’s been more work than I expected, just to get things back to a place where it kind of looks like the website did before.
That said, even when some things were not working, there’s often a way around them, and the team really helped with thinking about how to design things slightly differently. The core components to make a website that works are there, and while there are a few features that haven’t been implemented yet, I know the team is working on them.
How have you found using Fresco so far?
It feels quite similar to Mosaic for me, in the sense that it has components that you move around and put together and combine. I don’t find it that different, which is good because there’s no steep learning curve when you start using Fresco.
Some features that I used a lot before, like embedding external videos or podcast episodes, are still missing. The team suggested using buttons with external links instead, and that was a useful suggestion.
Has the migration prompted you to think differently about your content?
It has, actually. Having to review the whole website made me notice some things that could be improved, mostly things like the use of images. We’re not producing many images from the project, so I was using quite a lot of stock images, and some were repeated.
I also restructured a couple of pages to make the content more easily readable. We built the website about three years ago, and I’d been adding content regularly but not really reviewing the site as a whole, so it was a good opportunity to do that.
How do you feel about the Fresco project overall now?
I really see the point of the Fresco project, because I think it’s going to harmonise the visual identity of university websites more. For us, we’re ending up with a website for our research project that’s easy to use and edit, and if I had to pass it on to someone else, I think it would be easily maintained as well, which is a good thing to have in mind.
What advice would you give to someone about to start their own migration?
Engage early. It depends on the size of the website, but even for our website, which isn’t huge, it still took me a few days to review everything and fix things, so it does require some time.
If you’re preparing to migrate your own site from Mosaic to Fresco, Mathilde’s experience highlights the importance of allowing time, engaging early, and making use of the support available throughout the process. You can find practical guidance in the pre-migration checklist to make sure your site is in good shape to make the move.
Fresco is developing iteratively, with new features and improvements being added over time, and migrations are taking place in line with the available functionality. To stay up to date with the latest, check out Fresco’s release notes, published fortnightly.
