For most of our web maintainers, working on the website is only a secondary task.
Because we know our web maintainers don’t have much time, we are providing this quick-start checklist. Take an hour or two each week, do each of these items in order, and you’ll have a better website by the end of the semester:
Show Your Faculty How to Suggest a News Item
Any faculty or staff member can post a news item on your department’s website. Making sure all of your faculty members know how to do this is one of the quickest ways you can start getting interesting, useful content on your website.
Post News and Events
Using your news feed and events calendar shows visitors (rather than just telling them) what your department is all about. It also helps search engines find you and gives visitors a reason to come back.
Add Calls to Action
Add our standard undergraduate and graduate calls to action to your major and program pages.
Use Your Highlights Collection Effectively
Don’t duplicate your menu. Use the highlights to feature content that isn’t immediately visible on your menu.
Write Boilerplate
Have basic information on hand about your faculty members, your programs, and your department. You’ll use this to improve the quality of your news and events.
Round out Your Program Sites
Your website is the central source of information about your academic programs. Make sure you have quality content about each of them.
Create a Refresh Schedule
Quality content only remains quality content if it is up to date. Create a schedule for reviewing and refreshing everything on your website.
Ask Your Faculty Members to Put Your URL in Their E-mail Signatures
Once you have good content on your website, get your web address out there. Putting the URL in everyone’s e-mail signature gets your website out there hundreds of times each day.
Make sure they include it in their Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media profiles, too!
Get Your Department Linked on the Sites of Relevant Professional Organizations
If your department is a member of any organizations that have a website, make sure they provide a link from their website to yours.
Get Rid of Orphans
Make sure every page on your website is on a menu. People can’t visit what they can’t find.
Convert Content to HTML
Take content currently trapped inside PDF, Word, Excel, or PowerPoint documents and convert it to HTML.
