1. Identify Your Audience
Who is your primary audience? Without answering this basic question, you'll have a very hard time reaching the people that matter and an even harder time focusing your efforts. Before you take a foray into the digital landscape, determine who you're trying to reach, what you hope they'll do with this information, and why reaching them is important.
2. Check Existing Resources
There are a number of existing ways to reach audiences across UCSF, and you might be able to save yourself time and energy by taking advantage of them. If you're trying to share documents or messages with other UCSF community members, consider Chatter, Box, Wikis, Github or SmartSheet, all of which exist in MyAccess. If you're trying to reach audiences external to UCSF, explore existing sites; it's possible your information already exists or that you could add your information to an established site. You may also want to consider social media or email as outreach methods.
3. Develop a Content Strategy
If you want to have a successful website, you'll need a fully-developed content strategy. Content strategies establish target audiences, stakeholders, goals, content and more. There are a number of existing guides on how to develop one, but this is a good starting point. Having a solid content strategy will ultimately shape your overall success and how its measured. Make sure all project stakeholders are agreed on a content strategy before investing time and resources on a website.
4. Create an Outreach Strategy
A lot of people have the assumption that, if they build a website, people will come. Unfortunately, that's just a fantasy; in an increasingly competitive environment, every site owner has to take active steps to increase their site's impact. Before you begin, determine how you'll ensure your website reaches the right people. Do you have partner sites that can link to yours? Do you have a keyword strategy or ideas about how to boost your SEO? Are there existing channels, with existing audiences, that can drive traffic to your website? Have you considered other avenues of communication?
5. Assess Your Ongoing Costs
Websites are expensive to build and maintain, and it extends beyond staff time. If you choose to develop and host a site independently, keep in mind that there may be costs you aren't anticipating, both in terms of ongoing fees and updates. Make sure to allocate an ongoing budget for website maintenance and improvements to ensure you have a sustainable, secure site both now and in the future. However, if you're hosting a Drupal-based site on UCSF's servers or choose to use the UCSF Site Builder, you'll save on both hosting and development.
6. Plan for Updates & Maintenance
Having a website is a lot like having a puppy. While it might seem really exciting at first, the reality is that they require long-term care — not to mention frequent attention. For your website to be useful, you'll need to update content, install security updates and more. You wouldn't want your site to be hacked, would you? That said, if you're using the UCSF Site Builder, you can restrict your worries to relevant, up-to-date content.
7. Design It Carefully
Your site's design should meet the needs of your overall content strategy as well as UCSF brand guidelines. Beyond overall look & feel, you should consider your menu structure, language and imagery. If you need help shaping your navigation, card sorting is an effective method and only requires index cards, a writing device, and some willing participants. For general copy, it's best to keep things simple and assume your readers will scan a page before diving in. Make sure to keep text short, put important information up top, and add subheaders. If you need images, explore our brand photography library.
8. Build Your Website
You're ready to take your content and make it shine! If you're using the UCSF Site Builder or creating a Drupal-based site that will be hosted on UCSF's servers, you can request a UCSF.edu subdomain. If not, you can procure your own domain and build on your chosen CMS. Create pages, build your menu and add images or videos. Remember to keep styling consistent across pages, and to include subheaders, links and calls to action. If you glance over a page, can you immediately identify key information? If you can't, there's a good chance your visitor won't be able to, either.
9. Collect Feedback
No one works in isolation. If you want to make sure your site is a positive experience for a broad number of users, make sure to gather feedback from colleagues, family and friends. It's a good rule of thumb to have ten people review things like your website's language and formatting to make your site as good as it can possibly be.
10. Launch Your Website
You've built your website, thoroughly reviewed it, and you're ready to share it with the world. If your site will be hosted on UCSF's servers, create a DNS request ticket with ServiceNow, but keep in mind that your request may take up to three days to complete. If not, work with your hosting service to ensure its live and submit it for inclusion on the A-Z site list. Once it's up, look over your site one more time to ensure everything is working properly.