Understanding Strategy

Once you’ve launched your site, you should continually review and improve the business strategy that drives how you build pages and select content. Every member of your Web stewardship team should be familiar with your strategy, which defines the business purpose, target audience, key tasks, calls to action and measurable goals of your site.

Business Purpose

Team members responsible for stewarding your website need to understand the site’s main business objectives. Questions they should be able to answer include:

  • What is the key purpose of the site?
  • Is the site fulfilling its purpose?
  • What key messages do we want the audience to walk away with? 
  • Is our audience getting those messages?

Target Audience

Understanding a site’s target audience is also critical to stewardship. Some points your team members should consider as they update content:

  • Who are your most important audiences? Which mental models does the site target?
  • Are you writing and presenting content in a way that appeals to these groups?
  • What are the needs of your key audiences, and are you meeting those needs?

Key Tasks

Website stewards also need to understand the tasks that users are coming to a site to perform. Are they trying to find information? To register for a class or event? Some questions about key tasks that can guide how you steward a website:

  • What are the key tasks your users are coming to do?
  • Will planned changes to the site make it easier to complete these tasks?

Calls to Action

A “call to action” is an element on a page that prompts users to take a specific action. A common form of call to action is a link that says asks users to “Learn More” or take some other action. A few questions that can guide how your Web team structures calls to action on your site:

  • How can you use calls to action to deepen a user’s relationship to UB? Should you ask them to apply to a program, find out more about a topic, or become a UB Believer?
  • Are your calls to action clear?
  • How often are the users clicking through and completing your calls to action?

Measurable Goals

Lastly, you should establish measurable goals to assess the success of your site. Each member of your stewardship team should be familiar with these goals. Consider these questions:

·         What measureable goals have you identified to help you analyze if the site is successful? 

·         How will you measure these? And how often?

·         Have you reviewed your website statistics to determine how successful your website is? For information on how to track website performance through Google Analytics, visit the Learning to Use Analytics help page.

Other Website Stewardship Topics

Planning for Stewardship
Learning to Use Analytics
Building a Team

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