In my previous post “higher ed website redesign: why you should build your case,” I discussed how important it was to make a good case to “sell” the redesign to VPs and Website Stakeholders.
I think the result-oriented approach is the most efficient to convince decision makers. By including as many measurable data points as possible, you usually help them back up their decision.
There are many reasons to redesign a college/university website, but I’ve listed below my top 5:
- Improve Website usability
- Comply with ADA standards
- Comply with Web standards
- Optimize your (and your visitors’) bandwidth use
- Improve your website rank in search engines
When many users complain about how difficult it is to find what they are looking for on the website, its information architecture is the culprit most of the time. The way your content is organized throughout the site or on every single page will make a big difference for your users.
Your website information architecture might not have been addressed properly when the website was designed. Major shifts in the website goals may have resulted in uncontrolled web development outgrowing the initial information architecture.
You should gather and analyze relevant data (user email messages, web survey results, focus group reports, etc.) to show your VP some of the points in the IA that need to be addressed to make the website more user-friendly.
If your website was designed in Photoshop by a print graphic designer transitioning to the Web a few years ago, chances are that it relies a lot on graphics without their “alt†attributes, graphic navigation buttons and complex embedded tables.
Colleges’ and universities’ websites must comply with the American Disability Act.
You should run your homepage and second-level template through Bobby to test them again section 508 guidelines. The output will be a visual report that will help you show how much needs to be done to comply with the ADA.
If your website is an outgrowth from the browser compatibility wars, you might still have some “dirty†code in your web pages and/or huge chunks of JavaScript to perform complex browser detection schemes. Inherited from a time when Internet Explorer, Netscape, and other browsers were trying to express their creativity (and locking users in their own proprietary view of the Web) by using their own way to interpret HTML tags and attributes, this code doesn’t comply with today’s (and tomorrow’s) Web Standards. Web design shops made a fortune coding to assure backward compatibility so website design was consistent regardless which browser was used. Fortunately, those times are gone, and it’s now possible to code for forward (and not backward) compatibility.
By following more widely-supported Web Standards, Colleges and Universities are investing in code that will not only work with future browser versions and devices, but also make the next redesign easier thanks to the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which allow global style changes in an eye blink.
You should run your homepage and second-level template through W3C Markup Validator to test them against Web Standards. This report can also help you make the case for the redesign.
While more and more web users access your website through a broadband Internet connection, isn’t there a better use of your college or university’s (or your users’) bandwidth than to serve – every year – zillions of pages that should be 20KB lighter?
You should run your homepage and second-level template through this free web page analyzer to get your web pages’ vitals. This report will be a nice addition to your redesign case, especially if you compare it with the report you will run once your new design is completed.
You can also do the math (expected reduction in page size X total page views) to show your VP how many GB could be spared in data transfer by replacing graphics-based navigation menus by their CSS text-based counterparts.
Search engines love content and tend to be pretty friendly with higher education websites as long as they don’t make their indexing too difficult.
By improving (reducing) your code/web content ratio, you will speed up the job of Google, Yahoo and MSN indexing robots. If you can decrease the number of code lines used for your web pages, search engines will give your website a better relevancy grade. A website redesign will also allow you to address one of the main search engine optimization (SEO) points: optimized use of TITLE, H1 and H2 tags. The content displayed within these HTML tags is assigned a very important weigh in the algorithm used by search engines to determine which websites should be listed at the top of search results for a specific keyword phrase.
You should run your web address through this free search saturation tool to find out how many of your web pages are indexed in the major search engines.
All these documents and reports will back up your redesign project by showing precisely how it can have a positive measurable effect.
Did I miss any important reasons?
While I think these are all good reasons, for me they were hard sells to the administrators, except for search engine placement. When they heard about technical things, their eyes started to glaze over…
What worked for our institution was explaining how a redesign could help meet other important institution-wide goals– for us this was increasing enrollment, but it could be soliciting donations, positioning the university to better reach desired groups of students, etc. I found the administrators could relate to this marketing-speak more, and were more behind change if they saw how it could help the university as a whole.
Thanks!
Andrea
Thanks for your comment, Andrea!
I think it all depends on who is going to make the decision.
If the VP in charge of Information Technology has his/her say, the technical mesurable points will address his/her questions. As far as the American Disability Act compliance is concerned, colleges and universities have to comply to make sure they don’t get into troubles (read: possible legal action).
I work for the Marketing & Communication Office, so I guess the marketing-speak is actually my mother tongue ;-).
But, I do track the numbers of online applications, admission information requests, registered alums and online donors in my college website dashboard.
I guess I’m not bold enough to state that a redesign will result in a 10% increase in online applications or online gifts.