Each year brings new beginnings and fresh starts. What if this was your year for a fresh start with how you manage your website? If you had the time — if you really had the time — how would you build the perfect system to manage your site and its contributors?
Would you have a process where only skilled, technical people could make updates and changes, even for simple text? Maybe, but you’d likely end up with a backlog of requests.
Would you funnel everything through a single resource? Perhaps, but that’s typically a recipe for one overworked, unhappy person.
Would you build up staging servers so your webmasters had a place to put things and decision makers could review them before they went live? That’s unnecessary extra work.
Would you just continue to add more and more technical people as the demands of your stakeholders continued to grow?
Perhaps you’d take the free-for-all approach and allow each department to make its own decisions and update sections of the website. You’d call it “more efficient.” You’d give the departments general guidelines for colors, styles, and logos and encourage contributors to follow them. And each department would be limited only by what they could afford — even if it resulted in many different systems spanning your campus.
None of these options is ideal. And when you add in the pressures to attract more prospective students, deliver more dynamic content, and do it all without spending any additional money, they look even worse.
What you’d really build is an ecosystem of skilled, motivated people, all focusing on what they’re good at and working toward a common goal.
Content would be created by the people who know it best, with a simple editing tool that doesn’t require technical knowledge. It would be routed through a workflow for the right people to approve it before publishing. It would go through checks and balances to ensure there are no misspellings or accessibility issues. Older versions would all be saved so reverting would be a snap, if needed. And of course, publishing would be instant. No queues, no hold ups.
Templates would be implemented to make sure content contributors operated within the guidelines established by the entire school. Departments couldn’t randomly select a shade of orange that’s “close enough” to your school logo; they’d be forced to use the official color just like everyone else. And people would only be allowed to edit the things appropriate to them, so they couldn’t break things and make mistakes.
Libraries would host all of the text, logos, and pictures used across the website, for easy retrieval by contributors. Commonly used elements like the enrollment count would be centrally managed so a user would only have to edit it once, and every other mention of it on the site would automatically update.
Your system would be extensible, giving you the freedom and power to design and add your own features without worrying about security issues and updates breaking what you worked so hard to create.
Your system would give you access to a community of like-minded users who share and work together. They’d be focused on the business of marketing in higher ed, not just on reusable technical components. And you’d build your own community, too. A community of administrators, developers, and contributors using a simple, yet powerful tool, forming a lasting set of partnerships to share the challenges that come.
Your system vendor would be 100% immersed in your industry, with a product centered on years of listening to your higher ed peers discuss their needs. You would have a voice in the future roadmap of the system. The company would be your partner, your collaborator. It would constantly be introducing new features and add-on products to enhance the system’s experience and allow you to extend your digital marketing capabilities.
And all of this would exist in a safe place — decoupled from your live site, impacting neither the performance nor the stability of your public image.
You’d build OU Campus™. So why reinvent the wheel?
