Developing and Maintaining Web Content – WRK2

To start the official portion of the Higher Education Web Professionals conference I attended a workshop on generating ideas on developing and maintaining web content. Doug Tschopp, the Director of the Entreprenurial Center at Augustana College in Illinois, led a group of designers, writers, editors, and social media managers on the issues facing higher education institutions wanting to create compelling content for their web presences.

Here are some of the takeaways I took form our discussion:

• Never look at something twice if you can do it once.
• Remember that you can’t please and serve all audiences effectively. Know your primary audience, build your site to their needs, and use secondary navigation elements to address secondary audiences.
• Shopping for a Higher Education institution is different than all other online shopping experiences. Students start with all of their options in their basket. With so many items in the shopping basket, initial decisions to remove institutions are made impulsively and arbitrarily. A poor web presence or user experience can remove you from consideration even before the student critically looks at you as a viable candidate, which can kill a smaller institution with a finite pool of available potential students.
• Individuals are more likely to fill out a form than they are to send an email to you. If they encounter a problem with their email system, the institution is invariably blamed even if it not their fault.

In the second portion of the workshop, Doug shared with us the results of a card sort he did of incoming students to help determine the information architecture for Augustana’s redesign. The results were intriguing:

• About: Students did not identify with About. They almost always chose to call the material in an about section General Information. For these students, About is a subset of General Information, and should be reserved for the introductory test of an about us section, not a massive category that includes maps, directions, etc.
• General Information bucks the trend of task-based navigation: Although the general trend for navigation is to move towards task-based categories, this reference area tends to stay categorical in student’s minds.
• All of the students discarded Prospective Students as a category bucket for information. Although this is common terminology in higher education for potential students, it is not a category that they self-identify with. Think of another term – for instance Texas A&M uses “Become a Longhorn” for this category in their navigation.
• Other terms that meant nothing to students and were discarded: FAQ, Intramurals, Computing Services.