Chapman’s website is a key gateway for our community. Keeping it user-friendly, accurate, and well-maintained ensures clarity, trust, and alignment with our goals. By following best practices in content, organization, and CMS training, we create a strong and reliable online presence.
Care About the Website
Ensuring quality and relevance of Chapman’s website is crucial as it serves as a primary gateway for prospective and current students, staff, faculty, and various other Chapman stakeholders to learn about our institution’s offerings and initiatives. A well-maintained website not only reflects our commitment to a quality education but also enhances the user experience, fostering engagement and trust with our audience.
Adopt a User-Centric Mindset
Our website should prioritize the needs and interests of our external audiences. This ensures we meet our audiences’ expectations with a seamless and intuitive browsing experience that answers their questions. By emphasizing user-focused content over departmental intricacies, we create a cohesive and concise website that effectively communicates the value and essence of our university.
Prioritize Purpose-Built Development
Emphasizing purposeful web development ensures that each web page aligns with Chapman’s strategic objectives, maintaining coherence and effectiveness across our site. By prioritizing relevance and clarity, we ensure that every visitor’s journey is guided by meaningful content and that we are not over-creating content that could muddle our audience’s experience.
Embrace Interconnectivity
Recognizing the importance of interconnectivity in web development helps us avoid duplicating content and instead directs users to existing, relevant pages. This approach optimizes navigation, enabling visitors to follow a cohesive network of content that enhances their understanding of our institution. It also reduces the workload of building a page that already exists elsewhere and keeps the website’s bloat.
Maintain Your Content
- No Stale Content – Regularly updating webpages ensures that our content remains fresh and relevant, reflecting our commitment to providing up-to-date information to our audience. By avoiding stale content, we maintain credibility, engagement, and trust with our visitors, fostering a dynamic online presence that effectively communicates our institution’s latest developments and offerings. Make sure you’re updating your photos, testimonials, program information, faculty bios and other content that changes on a fairly regular basis to continue delivering an up-to-date and accurate user experience.
- Retire and/or Delete Old Pages – Quite simply, if you don’t need the page any longer, it can be deleted. This helps keep the website and the CMS it’s hosted on clean and fast, and helps avoid confusion for future web content developers.
- No Yearly Pages – All pages should be general pages and should not have years in the page title or URL. This helps keep the workflow associated with updating low and also avoids a graveyard of past years’ pages.
Do Not Make False Statements
Maintaining integrity in our website content by avoiding false claims is paramount to upholding our university’s reputation and legal compliance. By ensuring accuracy and transparency, we mitigate the risk of legal repercussions while fostering trust and credibility with our audience, aligning with our commitment to ethical communication and accountability.
Use Your _files Folder
Maintaining cleanliness and clarity in site organization is crucial. All image files, PDFs, etc. associated with your webpage must be stored within the designated _files folder in your site structure. If you don’t have one, create it or seek assistance from SMC.
Take And Follow CMS Training
Access to the CMS will be granted upon completion of mandatory training, ensuring familiarity with website maintenance guidelines and policies. Adherence to these standards is required to retain CMS access, with failure to comply potentially resulting in access revocation. Strategic Marketing and Communication oversees policy enforcement, reserving the authority to revoke access for violations.