Top Ten Ways to Prepare for Your Higher Ed Website Redesign

By Beacon News | Published February 6, 2015 | Categories: Higher Education

After recent experience with several higher education website redesigns, I've come up with a list of the top ten ways that you, as a higher education client, can prepare for an upcoming website redesign project.  Though these items aren't technically required right at the beginning of a redesign project, they are all eventually needed and the sooner they are brought to the table, hopefully the more satisfactory the project results.

1. High resolution .eps or .ai files of  all variants of the official logo (including reversed text, for example)
2. An official "style guide" (preferred) or, minimally, a list of brand/official fonts and colors (with hex codes please)
3. Considerations of all target audiences to be addressed by the website (prospective students, alumni, faculty/staff, community, media, etc.)
4. A variety of high resolution images of the campus, students, faculty/staff and activities, in both portrait and landscape formats
5. User id and password (read only access is usually fine) for any secure areas of the site that will be redesigned
6. Documentation of any dynamic/database driven pages currently in use (a data-driven, searchable academic catalog, for example) as well any forms and 3rd party sites linked to the live site (a third party site for prospective students to apply, for example)
7. Any  print or electronic marketing materials/brochures that have a graphical presence that should be considered for the website redesign
8. Requirements for search engine optimization and analytics tracking
9. List of websites with a similar look and feel to what you are trying to achieve with the redesign (do not have to be .edu sites)
10. Bonus points:  review my previous blog "Terms you need to know for your website redesign"

With these items in mind, I hope that your upcoming website redesign is very successful... Best of luck!