University of Auckland — Robotics
Web Consultant · 2012–2014
Unified the Robotics department's web presence from scratch. First taste of making technical work visible to a global audience.
What I Learned
- Technical excellence that nobody can find is not as useful as it should be. Discoverability is part of the work.
- SEO in 2012 was mostly about being systematic when others weren't. That's still roughly true.
- Research departments are full of interesting work that never gets communicated well. Bridging that gap has real value.
The brief was to unify and grow the online presence of the University of Auckland's Robotics department. When I came in, the department had a scattered web footprint -- multiple pages across different parts of the university site, inconsistent branding, and essentially no social media presence. Global engagement was minimal.
I spent two years consolidating that into something coherent: a unified content structure, consistent messaging about what the department was doing and why it mattered, and a systematic approach to SEO and social that made the research visible beyond the university's immediate audience.
The results were meaningful. Research that had previously been invisible to anyone outside Auckland was being found by peers, prospective students, and collaborators internationally.
What I remember most about this engagement is how much good work was being done in the department and how little of it was being communicated. The researchers were world-class. The communication infrastructure was almost an afterthought. Fixing that mismatch felt genuinely useful -- not just as a marketing exercise, but as a service to the work itself.
It was also my first real introduction to SEO as a discipline, which has shaped how I think about distribution and discoverability in almost every context since. The mechanics change. The underlying logic -- be where people are looking, in a form they can use -- doesn't.