Goals are in bold. All other text is for context and to provide examples/ideas.
- Institutional Goals
- Technical Goals
- Prioritize prospective students:
- Continue to create a site that is user-friendly and an informational tool for USD's primary web audience—prospective students—while serving the needs of current students and other members of the community, including alumni and donors.
- Return the Campus Life section to its primary focus as a visual tool so that it showcases and promotes the 'USD experience.' It should show USD life in action and provide a balance of academic, social, and recreational aspects to time at USD.
- Look at personalization for USD home page to better help with targeting content for audiences without affecting the main priority of the website.
- Continue to align the website with the admissions cycle and summarize requirements to help prospective students and parents year-round.
- Elevate content and eliminate clicks by removing intermediary pages; instead provide the resources that the student needs up front, including:
- Degrees offered (comprehensive of in-person/online)
- Study abroad opportunities
- Job prospects and placement
- Scholarship and internship information
- Create hubs that curate useful resources and empower those users for success:
- Create a more prominent Graduate Admissions gateway on the university's website with uniform content and resources, even though internally and operationally the various graduate admissions offices operate independently.
- Create a faculty hub that brings not only links, but content for faculty to the main-site level.
- Create a student hub that brings not only links, but content for students to the main-site level.
- Create an enrollment management area that brings together one stop services, student accounts, registrar, and financial aid information to make the operational and financial aspect of paying for college as seamless as possible.
- Blend admissions and financial aid information so that the excitement of USD opportunities and the way to attain them are more connected.
- Highlight accomplishments and opportunities with visibility and storytelling:
- Showcase student, faculty, and alumni in a way that ties back to USD's mission and core values and inspires new students and their parents with their stories.
- Help solidify USD’s stance as a contemporary Catholic institution by prioritizing Faith & Service on the website.
- Spotlight faculty research, scholarship, and specialties through various types of content and systems.
- Promote student scholarships by better managing the central scholarships site and feed this same information to the academic websites.
- Streamline content to improve usability and searchability:
- Be more straightforward with functional and informational details on the website; be mindful of when to 'sell' our product versus when a heavy marketing push keeps users from finding simple information they need.
- Better educate content providers about writing for the web so that information can be targeted to the correct audience, refreshed, recycled, and archived, thus improving search results.
- Implement a cleaning-out process for files to archive materials that don't need to be on the web server (i.e. documents and images).