Web Council - April 23, 2015

UW Web Council April 23, 2015 Meeting Minutes

Law School Migration - Nora Robertson (thenora@uw.edu)
- UW Law Migration & Content Strategy
  - Updating the site at https://www.law.washington.edu/
  - Old Website did not meet needs
  - Guided by "Content Strategy for the Web" - http://contentstrategy.com/
    - Reality
      - Now
      - Problem
      - Solution
    - Discovery
      - Alignment
      - Audit
      - Analysis
    - Strategy
      - Core
      - Content
      - People
  - Defined Migration Goals
    - UW Brand
    - Better navigation & site structure
    - Responsive design
    - Accessibility
      Bbuild consistency
    - Cross-promote content
    - Approval workflows
  - Did Competitive Research
    - Looked at other law school sites
    - Smaller schools were doing better websites because they needed students
    - Like NYU Law - http://www.law.nyu.edu/
      - Highlighted scholarship at NYU
      - Felt young
  - Understanding our audience
    - Worked with personnas
  - Understanding our reality
    - Quantative audit
      - Google analytics
      - 15,000 pages, ~1200 hand coded
      - five folders made up 68% of total page views
    - Qualitative Content Audit
      - Is it current
      - Is it relevant
    - Working with subject matter experts
      - Very knowledgeable
      - Not knowledgeable about content strategies
  - Don't Get Personal
    - Conducted Designer 101 trainings for everyone involved
      - Creating templates
        Consistency while allowing customization
      - Use of white space
      - Basic usability; people scan pages, they do not read them word for word
      - Understanding messaging
        Balacing what we want to say versus what a student comes to find
  - Phase One, What We Have Done So Far
    - New Home page
    - Landing pages for programs
    - Building brand and consistency
  - What's Next: Phase Two
    - Moving to Umbraco CMS - http://umbraco.com/
    - New calendar/events system
    - New directory
    - Get all content migrated
      - Conduct roling content audit
    - Evolve Subject Matter Experts into Content Managers & Creators
State Relations Interactive Map - Jeff Hendrickson
- http://www.washington.edu/maps/state/
- Map show state districts. Click on a district and see Fast Facts about what the UW is doing in that district
- Useful in dealing with legislature, general public relations
Telling the UW's Story - Victor Balta, Director of News & Information
- What N&I does
  - N&I puts together the UW Today site
  - UW Today Email
  - UW in the Media
- N&I staff described at http://www.washington.edu/news/about/
- Goals
  - Increase visibility
  - Cover research, pitch news media
  - University ranking, budget, messages from the president
- Example of converting study to a story
  - Early child care affecting stress response story
  - Turned into news release, sensitivity to stress shaped during first 2 years of life, UW study finds
- Reporters contact us for experts
- We track the news and get our experts out there
- Other
  - Coaching researchers and administrators
  - Outreach to units
  - Social media
    - Multimedia (videos, photos, galleries)
    - Coordinate with other communications, on and off campus
    - Track media placements
    - UW in the Media
    - Monitoring of TV in its many channels and forms
- Proven Impact
  - 2539 UW mentions in major national, international media
  - 1860 mentions in major regional, statewide media
- What can people do to get their news out?
  - Send your ideas to uwnews@uw.edu
Boundless Brand - UW Marketing
- Built the "Be Boundless" website - http://www.washington.edu/boundless/
  - Wanted to do all the things we were recommending
  - Conducted workshops
    - Assumption personna workshop
      - The Essential Persona Lifecycle: Your Guide to Building and Using Personas, by Tamara Adlin and John Pruitt - http://www.amazon.com/The-Essential-Persona-Lifecycle-Building/dp/0123814189
    - Experience Map workshop (for an explanation of experience mapping, see http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/the-anatomy-of-an-experience-map/)
      - From where would our person be coming from
      - To where would we be sending our persona to accomplish her goals/tasks
      - What would it take to get them there
  - Results
    - Brainstorming content
    - wireframe iterations
  - What worked
    - Workshops generated buy-in
    - Gave project contributors a focal point to refer back to
    - Relevance of content to our persona verified by analytics on the live site
  - What did not work
    - Not having the same people involved in each workshop
    - Experience map was not as successful as hoped
    - Would try a "Core Model" method instead of the experience map
      - "The Core Model: Designing Inside Out for Better Results" - Ida Aalen of Netlife Research on A List Apart - http://alistapart.com/article/the-core-model-designing-inside-out-for-better-results
  - On Conducting Workshops
    - "Game Storming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers" - by Dave Gray, Susan Brown, James Macanufo - http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596804183.do
  - "Be Boundless" website is a single page application written using Backbone
    - Implemented in WordPress with Custom Content Types
    - Code is available on Github at uw/be-boundless
    - JSON API lets you develop without templating everything in PhP - http://jsonapi.org/
    - Collects a lot of information about what users are doing on the site

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