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
- Reality
- 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
- Quantative audit
- 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
- Creating templates
- Conducted Designer 101 trainings for everyone involved
- 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
- UW Law Migration & Content Strategy
- 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
- What N&I does
- 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
- Assumption personna workshop
- 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
- Built the "Be Boundless" website - http://www.washington.edu/boundless/