PSEWEB 2011: Plan it and they will come
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Plan it and they will come: Lessons learned from planning a post-secondary web redesign Presentation given at the 2011 PSWEB conference held in Toronto, Ontario. http://pseweb.ca/
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PSEWEB 2011: Plan it and they will come
- 1. Plan it and they will come Lessons learned from planning a post-secondary web redesign Chris Wong & Lori Munro Justice Institute of British Columbia
- 3. Do staff at your institution avoid linking prospective students to your website when marketing & recruiting?
- 12. The Overall Plan
- 18. Timeline
- 19. RFP Process & Choosing Vendors
- 28. The Content
- 44. Analytics Website Traffic: Number of Visits
Editor's Notes
- [ CHRIS ]
- The answer to all of these questions for our institution, the Justice Institute of British Columbia, or JIBC as we’re known, was unfortunately a resounding yes. If that’s also the answer for your institution, you may be a prime candidate for a web redesign. But this isn’t a session about how to determine whether you need to do a redesign, or what elements to include in a redesigned website - it’s about how to plan the project once you’ve bitten the bullet. Planning is key because web redesigns can easily become megaprojects that you lose control of. When that happens, forget about on time and on budget. Sound planning steps you take early in the project will pay dividends later when you’re in crunch time. Planning isn’t sexy, but it will reduce the pain in a redesign. And believe me, there will be a lot of pain.
- I’ll hand it over to Lori to talk about Our School.
- [ LORI ]
- Process & design - driven by vendor
- [ FLIP TO LIVE WEBSITE HOMEPAGE ]
- [ CHRIS ]
- So you’ve decided to go the redesign route, which may or may not include changing your CMS. Where do you start? In our case, we had a head start: Before I joined JIBC in late 2009, an extensive evaluation of the website had already been completed by a consultant. The evaluation, including interviews with students, staff and other stakeholders, was informally seen by senior management as a valid case for redesigning the site. But no funding had been committed and no plan was in place to make it happen. What next?
- Honest assess: What support do you have in senior management and in other parts of the organization - who are your key supporters and who needs to be brought onside What financial and human resources are available – what are you up against: our organization was going through some tough financial times, so we knew our business case needed to be compelling What gaps will you need to fill in your core team: Web Editor to rewrite content was key hire What’s the skill set of staff, which will point to what kind of CMS would be most appropriate for them Whether you need to build bridges with IT – we had a good relationship, and knew they were technology agnostic
- Then you’re ready to prepare a business case, which can be boiled down to this: Where are we: results of evaluation – it helps to have done one Where can we go: easy - show other sites so they can visualize the possibilities Why should we go there: it’s a marketing imperative, it’s about the reputation of our school, and it’s about service to our students How can we get there: the seeds of a plan How long will it take: not too long, not too short How much will it cost: less than the consultant said
- After our business case was approved, there was more writing to do: a Project Charter Strategy Deliverables Tasks and timeline Defining what’s in scope and, perhaps more important, what’s not in scope. Budget: an estimate Identifying project risks and having a plan for mitigating them Roles & responsibilities of the team It’s not just a document to put away after it’s done – if it’s thorough and relevant, you’ll refer to it constantly throughout the project. Important to have senior management to sign off on this – in our case, it went right to the top, with the President signing off Your organization may have a template. If you would like me to send you the template we used - email me at the address that appears at the end of the presentation or talk to me after the session.
- To be honest we struggled with coming up with an accurate timeline. But this gives an idea of how it worked in the end. [Briefly touch on all phases] So it’s not a clean and tidy process where one phase ends and another starts: there’s a lot of overlap And it’s not cut and dry. While most of the design work happened in the first half, the design vendor stayed involved right to the end, reviewing how their design was implemented.
- [ CHRIS ]
- One of the first things we did in this process was gather and prioritize a detailed list of draft requirements, which was included right in the RFP we conducted to find a web vendor and select a CMS. Advantage: made it crystal clear what was in scope for the CMS & website. Disadvantage: it could have hemmed us in. But that didn’t turn out to be a bad thing – forced us to focus on what’s essential. [ Flip to the actual requirements document in Word]
- Research: Proprietary or open source, vendors for both Scope: Our CMS needed to talk to somewhat difficult to work with SIS: Training Partner Process: Ensure the same info is available to all proponents. If there are questions about the RFP, issue amendments with the questions and answers. To make it fair, don’t just tell individual proponents. Decide if you want to invite specific vendors to respond, in addition to public posting of RFP If you have decided to not reveal the project’s budget, for example, stick to that no matter how much proponents pressure you, and they will. Decisions like that are your prerogative. Separate web & design RFPs - web firms aren't necessarily the best choices for design, and vice versa.
- Vendors will tell you that the CMS they’re aligned with perfectly matches your requirements, but dig deeper Customization could be huge - there's no such thing as off-the-shelf – and that’s certainly true with Drupal, which required a fair bit of customization So how do you know? Get a look at it from as many angles as possible (four white bullets) Vendors: ultimately have to assess whether you think they will put up with you and give you that extra level of support and service that will make a huge difference in the project
- [ LORI ]
- A true partnership, but clear who the lead dept. was and who the project lead was approvals from executive & senior management worked as a team with student services & technology services (IT) various working groups and committees our hands-on people were local admins and content editors uber admin is our webmaster
- Give & take relationship with vendors. e.g. requirements - didn’t deliver on every single one But went well beyond call of duty in many other ways (program & course search/online registration, and something as simple as accordions)
- key to the success of website – heart of the student experience real team approach
- our solution to get input and buy-in on the project
- [ LORI ]
- various means of dealing with content
- used extensively during project free, easy to use and to manipulate content and levels able to share ‘view only’ or edit access glitchy
- distributed model, differing skill levels Institute content written to get our messages across (who we are, etc) defined Drupal roles & levels of access (no green text!)
- Created levels of access and permissions
- [ CHRIS ] Overall, staff gave us good feedback on how the project went, and that was because of communication - they felt like they were in the loop. So communication is key.
- [Go through the different tactics] Communicate clearly to internal stakeholders how much extra time will be involved for them in delivering their part of the website. They need to understand that they will need to adjust their schedules and at crunch time, it will be all hands on deck. Be sure to acknowledge team members for their contributions during the project and after the launch.
- Abandoned Basecamp – too many places to communicate in can cause info overload – better to keep it simple Weekly conference call kept issues on everyone’s radar Occasional face to face was helpful in working with vendors
- Make sure your vendor has a solid issues management platform - you’ll be living in there. We used Lighthouse.
- It’s free and easy to do.
- [ LORI + CHRIS ]
- [ LORI ]
- [ CHRIS ] Program and course search/online registration scope change and missing times from course pages Meant 2 more months to the project, but well worth it
- [ LORI ] Sometimes you drop the ball. Own up, take quick and decisive action, and move on.
- [ CHRIS ] Taking the heat (HTML) Unexpected issues/budget reserves: (no course times) Showing up late (my online courses)
- Participating in web analytics project to track key metrics, spearheaded by Karine Joly, the woman behind Higher Ed Experts and collegewebeditor.com. Site has only been live for three months: high traffic, compared to what we’ve seen in the past, in first two months. Bit of a dip in April, but still about double where we were a year before. So we know there are a lot of eyeballs on our site. Now we’re doing a post-launch evaluation to see if they’re looking in the right places. There will be more usability testing, measurement, and tweaking. The fun never stops. But this presentation has to stop. On that note …
- [ LORI ]
- [ CHRIS ] If you ask a question you'll get some JIBC chocolate