Getting Started
Getting Started
If you think you might need a Web Express website, the following steps outline the process to get started with a new Web Express website.
Step 1: Determine if a Web Express site is right for your needs. Step 2: Plan your site strategy and create your content. Step 3: Learn how to use Web Express. Step 4: Submit a site request. Step 5: Build your site. Step 6: Launch your site. Step 7: Maintain and optimize your site.
- Use case: In general, if you need a digital marketing home for public content that supports an approved CU Boulder goal, a Web Express site might be the right tool. If you think Web Express might not be the right tool for your needs, OIT offers a variety of other tools and services that might better meet your needs.
- Site types: Review the list of acceptable site types on Web Express and see if your needs fit into one of these categories.
- Maintenance: Managing and maintaining a website requires time and attention. Make sure you have team members that can dedicate the time and attention to managing and maintaining a website on an ongoing basis.
- Existing sites: Consider if there is already another CU Boulder website that would be a more appropriate home for your content. Think about it from your audience’s perspective and what might make most sense for them. You can always reach out to websupport@colorado.edu if you’re unsure if there’s an existing site that might work better for your content.
The Basics
- Plan your site strategy: Use your business goals and any available research to inform the strategy for your site. This will help you think about your site as a strategic tool to support your audiences’ journey. Consider taking the short LinkedIn Learning course “How to Plan Your Website” if you’re not sure where to get started on a site strategy. LinkedIn Learning courses are available to all CU Boulder staff, faculty and students.
- Create your site structure: Using your site strategy and business goals, create the structure for your site. If you’re unfamiliar with information architecture, consider taking the LinkedIn Learning course “UX Foundations: Information Architecture” to learn the foundations of information architecture.
- Content creation: Use your site’s information architecture to begin creating the content you’ll need to build your site, such as copy, photos, videos, etc.
More Advanced Steps
- Research: If you have resources available, consider conducting research to inform your site strategy, information architecture and content plan. This might include conducting a peer analysis, stakeholder interviews or user journeys, among many other types of research.
- Content audit: If you are redesigning an existing site or merging multiple existing sites together, consider conducting a content audit, which is a systematic review of all of a website's content, including its performance, quality and how well it is supporting business goals. If you would like a download of an existing site’s content to conduct an audit, reach out to websupport@colorado.edu.
- Demo site: Check out the Web Express demo site to get a better sense of the foundational elements that the tool employs.
- Training site: Request a training site to get into the platform
- Tutorials and documentation: Check out our tutorials and documentation for hands-on training.
Request form: Once you’ve learned how to use Web Express, complete the site request form to request a sandbox site to begin building your site. Note that this is different from a training site, which is only used for training and to get hands-on experience with the platform before diving into a production site.
Site building: If your site request was approved, you’ll receive a sandbox site where you can use the content you created in Step 2 to build your pages. You will be able to share this site with other stakeholders for reviews and approvals as you’re working on it.
- Pre-launch checklist: Review the pre-launch checklist to make sure your site is ready to go.
- Submit a launch request: Once you feel like your site is ready to go live, submit the site launch request form. Be sure to account for 5-10 business days for your request to make it through the launch process.
- Maintain: After your site is launched, maintain the content to ensure it’s accurate and up-to-date.
- Audit: Periodically do a site health check to evaluate your site and ensure it’s still supporting your business goals, including checking your links, doing an accessibility check and cleaning up unneeded content and users .
- Analyze and optimize: Consider adding Google Analytics to your site to get a better understanding of how users are actually navigating and interacting with your site.