Starting a One Portal Website

Goals and Strategy

• Spend time determining what you need to accomplish. Understanding this will help you choose the appropriate tool or tools, create relevant content and understand the best way to reach your target audience. After you've thought about your content and goals, determine how you will measure the success of your website.
• What are you trying to accomplish or what is your objective by doing x, y or z? What is the potential impact? How does this align to a strategic objective? A strategy template can be provided to help you with this portion; contact jhickok@llu.edu to request this.

Performing Research  

• Become a consumer of other websites, blogs or forums to learn what content is of most interest, how you prefer to consume content, how other groups are sharing information, etc. 
• Browse other microsites on One Portal to see what other people are doing; when you see something that you’d like to try, make a note of it.

Choosing Your Tools  

• After listening, choose a tool(s) that best meets your goals and focus on building a strong presence.
  • You may have communication that is better shared via email, or perhaps with a web-based archive of messages such as a blog. 
  • You may wish to create lists that you can easily manage to keep your community up to date. 
  • You may wish to collect information from your audience. 

Collecting Your Content 

• Create a folder and start copying all the resources for your website into one place to make it easy for you to get organized.
• Talk to your frontline staff, the people who interact with your customers, especially the person who answers the department phone number.
  • Ask these staff members what questions they receive repeatedly. When people are asking questions, they are looking for information that can often be shared digitally.
• Brainstorm a list of information you want to share. Group similar items together to create an outline for your site navigation.

Tips

• Keep your list to seven items.
• Put the most popular items at the top. 
• Remember that you will have to maintain this. 
  • Think carefully about how often something will be used, and how often it will need to be updated.
  • Ask yourself if it’s worth the time required to update if only one or two people will look at it each month.

Call to Action

• Think about the things you want people to be able to do because they’ve come to your website. These things will be your call to action (CTA). Each page should have at least one CTA. Some ideas:
  • Find contact information and make a call or send an email.
  • Review a list of questions and find an answer.
  • Request a service from your team.
  • Watch a video (perhaps on how to use specific equipment safely).
  • Download a manual.
  • Find and use a resource.
  • Learn more about what your team does.

Completing Worksheets

• Complete the following worksheets (these will be provided to you when you’re ready):
  • Site Map Worksheet
  • Page templates for each page of your site
  • Word document for any additional page(s) of your website
• Send the completed worksheets, Word documents and any related assets (photographs, forms, links, etc.) to your project lead.

Reviewing Your Drafts 

• Review your site, click on links and check resources to make sure everything displays and works as you expect it to.
• The site will utilize the Drupal content management system for content management and hosting.
• All content may be modified to comply with graphic identity guide, digital identity guide, and the LLUH style guide to maintain web content standards.

Launching the Site 

You're ready to communicate! Use traditional means, such as email lists and printed materials, to notify your potential audiences that you have a web presence. Work with the Internal Communications team to announce your web presence to the appropriate audiences.