The first step to redesign is to assess the state of your website.
The best way to begin restructuring your site is by writing a text outline of your topics or categories with associated pages. The Web Team can provide sample outlines to illustrate this concept. We can also propose a revised structure and navigation for you.
Depending on your answers to the question above, the path toward redesign will emerge. Web Team staff can assist you as much or as little as needed. We can provide a page manuscript model (.doc, 27KB) for rewriting or editing your pages.
The bottom-line rule is that people don’t read on the Web, they scan. Text needs to be succinct, abbreviated and bullet-ized. And when it comes to dated content, “information rot” kills. More accurately, “information rot” kills your site visitors’ confidence that you are offering timely and accurate information and reflects poorly on your office and the University.
With a new site outline and page manuscripts in hand, site migration is an efficient process. Migration refers to the cut-n-paste process of taking content out of the page manuscripts and pasting it into the webpage templates in our content management system (CMS) and then publishing it to the live Web server.
Our CMS is called OmniUpdate (OU) and if you can edit MS Word documents, you can edit webpages with OU. The Web Team is pleased to assist as needed with this process.
The process is divided into three phases:
Here's a flowchart (.pdf, 322KB) that provides more insights into the Web redesign and migration process. If this flowchart seems too complex to you, don't worry—we're here to help.
