The College of Public Health and Health Professions recently underwent a dramatic re-centralization of dozens of its free standing websites, combining many department and degree program websites into a single core website for the entire College. With approximately 72 sites in their collection, this required careful analysis, a robust plan, and lots of effort to pull off!
PHHP’s Director of Strategic Communications and Marketing, Morgan Marvin, led the project, working closely with an outside agency and the UF Health Web Services team to see the project to completion.
In this article, we provide additional background about the project and share some lessons learned from Morgan.
PHHP identified the primary audiences as current and prospective students, faculty, and staff. With secondary audiences including prospective faculty and alumni/peers/donors/friends. With these major groups, they conducted a SWOT analysis to better understand where things stood with the current constellation of websites.
The current website framework (created and maintained by UF Health Web Services) provided them with a consistent platform that helped them adhere to regulatory requirements (such as accessibility regulations), was responsive, and easy to use and update. But, with all of their different website properties, they found it difficult for users to navigate and search between sites. They also found that lots of the information was buried deep into far off sites, didn’t have a consistent SEO strategy, and was out of date. Lastly, with so many website editors having access across so many sites, they saw threats to the way the content, its structure, and overall user experience could be managed.
PHHP saw an opportunity to rework the content to speak to their target audiences, using tools such as Market Muse to improve the SEO, and better tagging to help them organize and distribute news and articles across the site.
With these SWOT items in hand, they came up with their final goals:
- Improve SEO
- Improve site navigation
- Improve search functionality
- Optimize/maintain content
- Establish processes for content creation and maintenance
They developed a project timeline to help them meet these goals:
- Strategy and planning (2 months)
- business, functional, and technical requirements
- identify needs, wants, pain points and decision-makers
- current site documentation
- user experience research
- status report plans
- Development and programming (4 months)
- wireframe and design mockup planning,
- frontend and backend development,
- Content writing and assembly (3 months)
- Beta testing and review (1 month)
- quality assurance testing
- “go live” planning.
- Site launch (2 weeks)
With the project now complete, we sat down with Morgan Marvin to ask her more specific questions about the journey she undertook.
Q: What were some concerns you had identified in the decentralized model?
A: “….While the overall look and feel of the sites were fine, the user experience was lacking due to menu inconsistencies, outdated content, inappropriate messaging, and a lack of central governance. Site admins lacked expertise, so each site presented its own set of challenges to correct.”
Q: How were the sites for consolidation selected, and was there a process involved in selecting these sites and can you describe it?
A: “Sites were selected based on alignment between the college and the website’s overall goals and audience. This was both an art and a science. PHHP is more academically focused than, say, COM or VetMed, so it was imperative that the academic program and department sites were a top priority for us vs. clinically focused sites.
We prioritized each site by audience type and goals. We also took into consideration site traffic and ongoing maintenance.
- Priority 1: Sites intended for our primary audiences/goals including academic programs, departments, necessary faculty and staff resources.
- Priority 2: Sites intended for our secondary audiences including alumni and prospective faculty.
- Priority 3: Still very important but, these sites mainly intended for our secondary audiences and generally had lower site traffic such as centers and labs. Plus, most of these sites are maintained by faculty for research purposes and they can be very particular about things. We didn’t want to poke the bear(s) if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.”
Q: Why was an agency selected for this project and how did you select one to work with?
A: “While we had some level of expertise and bandwidth internally, we knew we didn’t have what was needed to fulfill this project. In short, our internal teams could only get us so far, so we needed additional resources to help us get to the finish line.
Identifying our approach to this project was honestly the hardest part. There were so many ways we could’ve approached it (both with and without an agency) and we explored a lot of them. Obviously cost played a big part in our decision; not only because it can be expensive to work with an agency, but because we knew there were some things we could do internally, so we didn’t want to pay someone else to do things we could do ourselves. So, we wanted to find an agency that would be willing to collaborate with us and be flexible on the scope of work. “
Q: How is the content updated on the new centralized PHHP college website?
A: “Just before the launch, UF Health provided an optimization report which was used to create a “website best practices” training. Anyone wanting access to the new sites must first go through that training before access is granted. ”
Q: What are your suggestions for anyone considering this type of project for their college or department?
A: I think having a strategic plan and getting all stakeholders on the same page is key for managing a project like this.
- Identify why you’re considering this type of project and what problems you’re trying to solve.
- Identify the project goals and routinely take a step back to make sure you are still working toward those goals.
- Who needs to be a part of the process (and who doesn’t!)? Be sure to communicate updates, successes and challenges to those who need to be in the know.
- Who is the primary audience for your site? Yes, faculty and staff are important site visitors, but are they your primary audience?
Do your homework. Don’t simply rely on the perspective of internal folks. Conduct surveys, focus groups, competitor analysis, interviews, etc to fully understand your audiences and what they want and need out of a website. If prospective students are your primary audience, talk to students to get their input and ideas.
Know your strengths and weaknesses. Know what can be done internally and what should be outsourced.
You’re going to ruffle feathers! Change is hard, especially for those who don’t understand why the change is happening in the first place. If you have a solid strategy, the help of subject matter experts and support from leadership and key stakeholders, keep pushing forward.
Efficiency is great but don’t take shortcuts that are going to hurt you in the long run.
You can have fast, cheap or good but you can’t have all three.”