You might have noticed this week that the Web Guide is looking a bit different. That’s because it’s in the middle of a revamp!
One of the first tasks for the Content Forum initiative was to review and relaunch the online support for site owners – so the Web Guide was a good place to start. To kick things off, the Faculty Web Managers, ICT web team and Comms web team got together for an afternoon brainstorm about the future content and structure of the site.
We used a content brainstorming technique which involved focusing what users of the Web Guide would come to the site to find or do – really concentrating on the task. As the first port of call for many site owners with questions about editing the website, the group quickly came up with a huge number of potential content ideas (which resulted in a lot of post it notes). I’ll talk more about this technique in a blog posting soon.
The brainstorm suggested a simple structure which we have adopted on the site now:
Getting started
This section will provide a clear starting point for people looking to develop an online presence, but aren’t sure how.
FAQs
Looking at web traffic to the Web Guide site, the most popular pages tend to be those relating to CMS help and it was clear from the brainstorm that most of the tasks identified were questions about how to edit pages – so we knew this needed to be a prominent section. We’re therefore pulling together all the existing help content and adding new material into a dedicated, easily searchable FAQ section.
Technology Services
This area will cover some of the technology services available, including collaboration tools like forums, wikis and blogs.
Strategy and policies
Here’s where you’ll find information the College’s web policies and standards, the web management structure and contacts and the latest Imperial web strategy.
While the new structure is now in place, there’s still a lot of work to be done to improve the content on the site. So please forgive its appearance right now – the content improvement work is ongoing. But I hope you agree the new structure is clear and it looks a lot better. If you have any comments or suggestions for content, please post them here or contact Pamela Agar. We want this to be useful to you!
