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Refreshing Your Department Web Site
The Office of Marketing & Communications' (MarComm) online-marketing team looks forward to helping you assess and refresh
your department's Web site. We approach refreshes in two separate phases: usability and creative. The following step-by-step process outlines the usability phase, which comes first. During this phase, we are working with you to make sure that your site is easy for users to navigate and to accomplish their goals.
Once your site has been optimized for usability, the entire MarComm team-including editorial, design, media relations, and online-marketing-can then work with you on the second, creative phase when we help define your department or program's strategic messaging. This messaging will likely result in content that can be used to further enhance your new and improved Web site.
1. Request Assistance via Web-Services-Request Form
Complete this short form on the Marketing and Communications Web site.
2. Schedule a Meeting
Once the project-request form is received, a member of marketing & communications' online-marketing team will contact
you to set up an initial meeting. This meeting should include
the person who is primarily responsible for maintaining your department
Web site, as well as any key stakeholders from the department who would
generate and/or approve site content, or any other interested parties.
3. Meeting Prep Work
Before the initial meeting takes place:
- The online-marketing team will conduct an analytics survey and usability assessment of your current site and generate a list of refresh recommendations.
- Your department should discuss the current site, and come prepared with possible changes or suggestions. Is there information that needs to be updated? Is there content that you'd like to feature more prominently or add to your site? Is there currently extraneous content that could be removed to make way for the new? For more assessment assistance, view these tips from the Web Advisory Committee.
4. Next Steps
After the meeting, the online-marketing team will develop a project timetable that will list project deliverables, responsibilities and deadlines. The timetable will include information on any new pages that need to be created or any changes that need to be made to current pages, as well as a projected refresh-completion date.
5. Production
Using the timetable as a guide, online-marketing staff will implement changes to your site as your department provides content deliverables. Note: These changes will only be on the staging server; changes will not be live on the public site until final approval is agreed upon during the follow-up meeting.
6. Follow-Up and Approval
When the changes are completed,
the online-marketing team will meet with your department to review your refreshed site. The goal of this meeting is to either identify any additional items requiring attention, or to approve the site for launch. If there are any outstanding items to be addressed, they will be addressed and another meeting will be scheduled to review this latest round of changes. Once the site is approved for launch, the online marketing team will make the changes live.