E-mail this pageDeveloping Effective Web Pages: Seven Key Checkpoints for Departments
The following checkpoints will help to ensure that your department is providing Web pages that are effective for constituents and are an appropriate use of College resources. Conducting this self-assessment of your Web pages will also help us in our overall efforts to determine the efficacy of our College Web environment.
Checkpoint 1: Know Your Audience
Has your department clearly identified our Web audiences, and determined their specific needs and interests? Online audiences determine the value of a web page. Pages that readers do not value are ignored. The focus of Web page development must be on them, not us.
Key Concepts:
- Always know your internal and external audiences
- Prospective students and their parents are a key audience for all departmental sites
Checkpoint 2: Write For Your Audience
Once you have identified your target audience, address them in simple, direct language they understand.
Have you focused on developing the content that our constituents want and value? What is "our message"? Is it clear, concise, and strongly presented on our site? Is it consistently developed? Have you spoken of benefits, or merely listed a set of features? How does this message sound in relation to the messages of our chief competitors?
Key Concepts:
- What tools can we use to know whether we are reaching our audiences with this message?
- How do we know what our constituents want? What data do we have to inform our content development? Have we consulted with the Web Editor on this issue?
- How do we translate our data on audiences into concise, effective messages online?
Checkpoint 3: Test and Assess Your Pages
Web pages that have not had the "reality test" with audiences run the risk of becoming mere vanity sites, thus expending campus resources to no positive result, especially in the areas of recruitment and retention.
Key Concepts:
- Nothing beats testing your Web pages on your target audiences.
- As the management saying goes: "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it."
- The Web Editor is an available resource for getting started with assessment efforts
Checkpoint 4: Encourage Visitors to Act
If content is king, then contact is surely queen.
Does your departmental Website encourage people to act? A successful Web site draws audiences more deeply through the links and encourages actions that create relationships with the department and the college.
Key Concepts:
Successful Web sites allow people to act in a variety of ways, for example:
- Get in touch with us
- IM (Instant Message) with us
- Download something
- Fill out a form
- Inform a friend about our site
- Link to us or bookmark our page
- Complete a transaction
Checkpoint 5: Content Is King
The success of your website relies heavily on the quality of the words you publish on it. Words are your fundamental asset and building block.
Key Concepts:
- The creation of quality content cannot be automated: someone has to write it. If that person is not good at their job, the whole process becomes counter-productive. The Web operation can assist you in polishing your writing and tailoring it to your audiences.
- Good Web writing facilitates the way online audiences read. People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. So bullets and blurbs are better than long dissertations. Web pages need to be designed with speed in mind.
Checkpoint 6: Living Up To Our Brand
Brand is one of any institution's chief assets. Every time a reader succeeds in carrying out a task on the Website, the brand's reputation is enhanced. Every time a reader is frustrated by the Website, the brand's reputation is diminished.
Key Concepts:
- Do the messages that our pages send align with the College's brand promise?
- Does our department back up those messages in substance?
If your department has questions about the College's brand promise, please contact your dean or Brendan Kinney at (518) 564-3615.
Checkpoint 7: Work Closely With the Web Editor
Have you worked collaboratively with the Web Editor to ensure that our site is professional and meets established guidelines for usability and accessibility?
Key Concepts:
- Don't make users learn new things. They won't, and they'll leave.
- If users don't understand a certain design element, they won't spend time learning it - instead, they ignore it and continue the hunt for their own goal. Their goals supersede your goals.
- Use easy-to-follow and consistent navigation. Think about the information they are seeking instead of how our institution is structured. Users should not have to care how our college is organized. Our college's organizational structure is not important to their needs.
- Avoid using complex graphics and photo collages that take forever to download. Keep page sizes small. Graphics should be kept to a minimum and multimedia effects should only be used when they truly add to the reader's understanding of the information.
- People only visit a bad site once but become loyal users of the good sites.
Questions, Comments, Suggestions?
If you have questions about SUNY Plattsburgh web policies, or want to learn more about how to write for the web, please contact:
Office of the Web Editor
Daniel J.S. Lewis, Web Editor
Phone: (518) 564-3977