Updating Your Website Made Easy
Problem: You have a website that looks great, but you need to pay a developer every time you want it updated. You don’t want to learn programming languages, but you’d rather not hire a developer to make small changes.
This is a common problem of small businesses. For years they heard they needed a website, and one day they finally hired a marketing firm to build them one. All was great for the first few months, until they realized that a successful website must be kept up-to-date.
I help clients by taking their existing website and adding what’s called a Content Management System - the site looks exactly the same, but adding or editing content becomes as easy as using Microsoft Word. Here’s a screenshot of a client’s site which uses Wordpress:
A side benefit to this system is that it greatly improves your Search Engine Rankings. The secret to being seen by search engines is to update your website often. It’s also important to make sure your website is search engine friendly so it can see those updates. The Content Management System allows you to do both of these.
Would you like to talk more about this? Please send me an email.
Case Study: Mays Business School
Mays Business School at Texas A&M University is recognized as one of the top business schools in the country for both its undergraduate and MBA programs. The Mays web presence spans across more than a dozen different websites, each with a different purpose and target audience.
For six months I worked with Mays to improve information architecture, move content publishing from the webmaster to the content creators, use Facebook and other social media to connect with students, redesign websites with a focus on usability, and use my expertise to find new ways to make current business processes more efficient.
The Mays Website is the largest of all the Mays web presence. With this importance, it has been the focus of their web development team and didn’t require much help from me. There were two ways in which I wanted to improve the website:
- Better connection with students
- More prominently show off executive speakers
» Facebook
Facebook is a social networking site used by 80% of all college students, 65% of those visit the site daily, and 95% visit the site at least once a month. If you want to be involved with students, use their tool of choice.
We set up a Facebook group called “Mays Business School,” and asked some students to join. Today the group has over 1,900 members – 40% of the business school’s student body. Students use this group to find out about events, post jobs/internships, and meet other business students. It provides the business school with a direct connection to their students, and a two-way conversation.
» Executive Speakers
Mays Business School has some amazing executive speakers: both the CEO of Walmart and the Senior VP of Lowe’s recently spoke to MBA students. They had been taking photos at these events but weren’t putting the photos out for everyone to see. We created a Flickr account – a popular photo sharing website – where all the photos of executive speakers and other events can now be hosted. We also included a flickr “widget” on all the Mays webpages which randomly pulled 4 photos from this collection. I’ve also encouraged them to conduct short, informal interviews with visiting executives and post them to Youtube, which can then be syndicated on any Mays site.
Mays Business Online is an online newsletter for Mays alumni, published bi-monthly. It contains full-featured articles about current events at the business school, as well as news about former students and faculty. We completely rebuilt the website in order to improve the frontend design and backend content management.
» Design
The new design conveys the Mays brand while following certain design principles for frequently updated websites. The site now looks better, is more usable, and its structure reinforces that this is a newsletter, not a static website, which encourages the user to come back.
» Content Management System
The biggest problem of the old site was updating it. The writers wrote the articles, then delivered them to the web team who coded it. Then it went back and forth between the two groups until it looked right. For news sites, the developers shouldn’t be the ones doing the updates; they should build a system that allows the content creators to publish it.
We took an open-source blogging platform and heavily modified it to allow every stage of content production to be done within this web-based software. It is easy to use (if someone can use Microsoft Word, he can use this system), creates clean and accessible code, and automatically builds archives of all the content. All the writer needs to do is click “Write,” write the article, and press “Publish” – and it does all the work.
This solution saves time, money, and the end result is much better than before.
Business Honors is a program for the most talented and motivated business students. As a smaller organization, I was allowed much more freedom to try new technologies and ideas to improve the experience for both students and staff.
» Design
I completely redesigned the website to improve the information architecture and the overall look. The navigation system on the previous version had become too cumbersome; whenever they added something to the website, they just added another item to the main menu. I broke the site up by user group and moved all the frequently updated content (news, events, jobs…) to a newsletter running on a modified version of the open-source blogging platform (like Mays Business Online above). On the homepage I added a rotating graphic used to inform students of upcoming events or important information.
» Communication
As this is a highly competitive and difficult program to get into, a major responsibility of the staff is to answer prospective students’ and parents’ questions. The majority of phone calls were the same set of questions. To safe the staff time, we created a comprehensive Frequently Asked Questions page, as well as encourage the use of email. But the most interesting means of communication is a live chat with the staff on the homepage of the website. During normal hours, a staff member will be available to answer any questions through a chat box on the website.
» Centrally Managed Documents
The Business Honors staff collaborate on many documents. They had been using email to pass documents around, but there were problems with versioning (“Do I have the most up-to-date file?”) as well as storage (emails must be deleted to make space for new ones). By taking advantage of Google Documents – a free service for documents and spreadsheets – a majority of these files are now stored online and accessible anywhere. By using this service, the file is always the most current version, and you can view previous versions. By integrating this into their workflow, they have saved a lot of time and headaches looking for lost files.
» Resumes
Students in Business Honors are seen as some of the best at Mays Business School, and businesses want them. Every year, Business Honors put together a resume book of all the students to be distributed to recruiters and major businesses. This was costly and took a huge amount of time reviewing resumes to make sure they were up-to-date. I have transitioned them to a web-based solution for students to manage their own resumes online, and provide recruiters with a webpage containing all of them.
Would you like a technology advisor to help you explore what new services could help and improve your business?
Send me an email.