The most important thing to understand about your site before you develop or redesign it has to do with purpose and goals. Your answers to the questions below will help you put together a site that meets your needs for dissemination and promotion, and your audiences needs or desires for information.
"What" and "why" come before "how"
Determine the audience, purpose and content for your Web site.
- Who is the audience for your site?
- What do you have to offer or say to them?
- What do they want?
- Based on those answers, what needs to be front and center on your site?
- How can you organize your content within the templates so the audience can find what they want?
- Do you have information that they might not realize they will need?
- Do you need to lay out a process, or sequence of steps?
Try to do this from the perspective of your audience, rather than from your own organizational structure, reporting needs, or processes.
Consulting with the Web coordinator during this process could eliminate confusion about the purpose of your Web site. The Web coordinator can help make sure your content is presented appropriately within the context of the entire university, is not misconstrued, or is not present elsewhere on the Web site in a slightly different form.
This process prevents the publication of duplicate sets of official UW-Stout information from different offices or perspectives.
Review and update your site on a schedule
Over time, your links and content will need to change. Prepare a schedule for maintaining links and updating content. Use this sample maintenance schedule (rich-text format, from the book Web site Redesign) as a guide.
Get approval
Work through your normal reporting channels for approval to produce a Web site for your class, program, department or unit.
Next step
There are several options for publishing.