The Strategic Website Assistance Project (SWAP) had five phases.
Phase 1: Market Research Surveys
Prospective undergraduate and graduate students will be surveyed to find out how they found IUP's website, what sections they use the most, what items they find most important to have on academic department web pages, what information they had difficulty finding, and other issues.
Start: March 25, 2013 | End: April 5, 2013
Phase 2: Internal Research Survey
An internal research survey of IUP faculty will be conducted to reveal their views about the website's audience, needed features, how updates to department websites should be handled, what messages the website needs to convey, and what features our academic department websites should have.
Start: March 25, 2013 | End: April 5, 2013
Phase 3: Focus Groups
An in-person focus group will be held with each college to gather qualitative information. Each focus group will have 10-12 participants, chosen by the faculty of each college.
The focus groups will help gain an understanding from the faculty perspective of the intent of the web pages for each program. The focus groups will also serve as consensus building tool amongst faculty. The quantitative data from the surveys will serve to balance and support the qualitative data in the focus groups. The goal will be to optimize each department's web presence for increased enrollment outcomes.
April 9 - April 10, 2013
Phase 4: Information Architecture Development
Paskill Stapleton & Lord will use the results of the surveys and focus groups to develop three information architectures that can be used for IUP's academic departmental website pages. (Information architecture refers to the organization and labeling of the information in a website.)
Based on those information architectures, the Office of Communications and Marketing will then create new visual designs (templates) around each of these as part of their work to upgrade our installation of Ektron to the latest version.
Start: April 2013 | End: May 2013
Phase 5: One-on-one Interviews and Content Development
Each academic department will be interviewed by a Paskill Stapleton & Lord consultant with experience in enrollment marketing and writing for the web. The department will select the template that best suits their needs. Paskill Stapleton & Lord will then provide a limited amount of content for each department website, along with a set of guidelines for the development of future content. The Digital Team will work with the faculty to review the proposed web pages and then post the pages with the approval of the faculty.
Interviews: April - Nov 2013 | Content Development: Completed June 2016