Groundwork: Outline Your Redesign Goals

Highly visible stuff everyone will notice: 

• Intuitive, scalable IA that makes navigating the site easy 
• Fresh, compelling design that feels like the college 
• Inviting, engaging content that reflects the personality of the college 
• Powerful, user-friendly publishing that enables content contribution

Does anyone not want these things? Every college web project (heck, every web project) should have these four goals someplace near the top of the priority list. But to what end? If we’re overhauling the IA to make the site easy to navigate, what are we hoping visitors will find? If we’re redesigning and rewriting the site to provoke an emotion what do we want the outcome of that emotion to be? Basically, building the super-duper new site on a slick new CMS is half the battle. The othe half?

 Less interesting stuff we’ll ultimately need to address in order to prove that the website redesign was actually successful:

• Usability (Is the site simpler to use? Are critical paths easier to navigate? Have page visits to key areas of the site increased? How do we know?)
• Stickiness (Do visitors return to the site more often? Do they stay longer? Do they sent content to friends / parents?) 
• Branding (What do our core audiences say about the new site? What are they doing online? What are they thinking about us?) 
• Recruiting (Did online application numbers jump? What about site traffic and stickiness for admissions & yield-related pages?)
• Giving (Did we see growth in online dollars? Number of online gifts or online donors? Growth in average gift size?)
• Engagement (Did participation rates in online communities increase? Was there an increase in event attendance or alumni giving?)

When putting together your goals for a website redesign, I’d argue that you need to prioritize the latter list (usability, recruiting, etc) according to your institutional needs. And then use the highly visible fun stuff (design, content, etc) to facilitate all of the outcomes you deem most important. 

It’s not enough that your new site look cool and be fun to read, it also needs to drive the audience(s) you deem most important toward taking the action(s) you deem most critical. 

Get all your goals on paper early and figure out how you’ll measure progress. That way when your site has been running for a few months and someone tells you how great it looks you can tell them about the 22% spike in admission applications it’s generated too.