Top Ten Ways to Prepare for Your Higher Ed Website Redesign
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.
- High resolution .eps or .ai files of all variants of the official logo (including reversed text, for example)
- An official "style guide" (preferred) or, minimally, a list of brand/official fonts and colors (with hex codes please)
- Considerations of all target audiences to be addressed by the website (prospective students, alumni, faculty/staff, community, media, etc.)
- A variety of high resolution images of the campus, students, faculty/staff and activities, in both portrait and landscape formats
- User id and password (read only access is usually fine) for any secure areas of the site that will be redesigned
- 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)
- Any print or electronic marketing materials/brochures that have a graphical presence that should be considered for the website redesign
- Requirements for search engine optimization and analytics tracking
- 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)
- 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!
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