Step 1: Assess your current site.

What’s working and what’s not? Are there information and tasks missing from your website? What goals do your audience members have when they come to your site? You may already know the answers to these questions. If you don’t, here are some ways to assess your website:

Get informal audience feedback.

Draw on student workers or students who regularly interact with your office. Ask them what they like about your site and what they would change.

Record phone questions.

Ask whoever answers your office phones to keep a log of the most common questions. Does your website cover these items? If not, plan to address them in your new site, especially in your FAQs. If the information is on your site, is it easy to find?

Request WebTrends reports.

These reports will tell you which of your pages get a lot of traffic and which don’t. When you revise your site, make sure highly trafficked content is accessible from your homepage. Think about why low-trafficked content is not more popular. Is it hard to find or labeled in a strange or unfamiliar way? Or maybe it’s just not important to your audience?

See an example of a WebTrends report.

To request a report, e-mail CNS.

Conduct usability testing.

If time permits, this is an ideal way to assess your current site. Often people use usability testing to make sure a new design works well, but it can also help you establish what changes should be made to your existing site.

See our related information on usability testing to learn more.

Step 2:  Map out your new site

After assessing your current site, you should have a better idea about what information your new site should contain. Now you should organize your content and map out how the information will appear on your new site. You might have heard this called working on the “information architecture” of your site. Here’s how to do it.

Decide what will be on your homepage.

Based on the information you gathered in Step 1, decide what items should appear on your homepage. Some people start out by outlining the information in some fashion or making lists. You’ll want to decide how to label links, making sure to avoid jargon. You’ll also want to decide what order links come in and in what sections of your website they may be placed.

Create a diagram or map of your new site.

Based on your homepage links, create a map of how you plan to organize the information on your site. This will give you a visual representation of your new site that will help with building the actual pages. (Maps are also a great visual resource for when you need to talk to others about what you’re doing!)

Here is an example of a series of maps University Publications created when working to revamp the Consider K-State homepage. We knew there would be a “clubs and activities” link on our homepage, so we created this map to visually represent how information on this topic would be organized. We created this simple map using Microsoft Word’s drawing toolbar.

For more information on mapping/diagramming your site, see Jason Withrow’s article, Site Diagrams: Mapping an Information Space on www.boxesandarrows.com.

Step 3:  Write your content

After creating a site map diagram, you can begin to write the text for your pages. You may find that some of your current webpage content just needs to be put into the new design templates. Other pages may need a complete overhaul.

Either way, this is also a good stage to look critically at your text. Does your writing style work for the web?  Do you use the right language, tone, etc.? Learn more about writing content for your website.