Importance
Starting any project can be daunting, especially when there are many vital and dynamic parts, like on your unit’s home website. By setting up the desired deliverables from the beginning, you can position your project(s) for success.
Websites encompass almost every part of the brand through colors, fonts and visual elements, but also the content, how your unit demonstrates the university pillars, how faculty interact with students and more. Referencing the Brand Guidelines website every step of the way will help ensure you are always on track.
Target Audience
- Project Managers
- Marketing/User Experience Professionals
- Web Developers
- Technology Managers
Definitions and Brand Guidance
Web Implementation Guidelines Group: A community of campus experts who volunteer their time outside of their day-to-day work to pursue the collaborative effort of establishing best practices for public-facing websites and communicating these best practices to the campus community at large.
Web Components / Toolkit: The toolkit, part of the work WIGG is doing, is a collection of components that have gone through design and review processes and become components built to be used publicly on any content management system or web-based interface that can process HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Illinois Web Theme: This is a general term used to refer to two separate instances.
Generally, a “web theme” manages the front-end design, establishing the overall appearance and functionality for the CMS. This front-end design and functionality is built with the toolkit, while the theme groups for WordPress and Drupal take the components and bake them into the CMS’s simplified user interfaces for users to easily use and customize the components.
NOTE: You don’t need the Toolkit to use one of the themes and you don’t need one of the themes to use the Toolkit. The purpose of the themes is to make editing components easier for the web content editors.
Hosted Brand Assets / Content Delivery Network: Specific assets, like the header and footer components, colors, graphic elements, icons and more are owned and managed by Strategic Communications and Marketing.
How-To/Instructions
Making sure vendors know that along with a beautiful website, you need one that is also functional, accessible and future-proofed can be easy if you are ready to ask for it in the beginning.
Deliverable 1: Meeting legal requirements.
Website accessibility has only become more important in recent months, with the newest regulations released in June 2024. According to Illinois IT Accessibility Policy, websites should be meeting WCAG 2.2 A and AA requirements.
Ensure your website has not only been tested by automatic tools, but has also manually evaluated by an accessibility expert. Not everything can be tested with the digital tools that are available.
Fun Fact:
This accessibility feature called the Skip-to element was developed by our very own Jon Gunderson and is becoming a community best practice on campus. You may want to consider adding this free, easy –to-use tool to your website!
Another important legal policy to include in your deliverables is the university Cookie Policy. Using our standard footer or one of the Illinois Themes can help make adding it to your website much easier.
Deliverable 2: Reports for accountability.
Being knowledgeable about your website is important. Some vendors use plugins and add-ons without telling you or your team. Make sure to get ahead of the game and ask for a report of all the add-ons that will be applied to your website.
Additionally, get a report of the OS, language, back-end database, hosting provider and/or CMS, including version information, will be used on your website.
You are probably already asking for this, but make sure to get some analytical reports, too! Google Analytics is free to use and important for gleaning user feedback on the performance of your content.
If you ever need to migrate your website to a new platform, these reports will be vital information. Quarterly reports should suffice for this need but pick reporting deadlines that make sense for your team.
Deliverable 3: Access.
Have at least one person from your team with admin-level access to your backend and hosting provider. Even if this person never logs in to change anything, having someone with access will help you feel secure if anything were to happen with the vendor/company.
Deliverable 4: Documentation on all custom components or content types created by the vendor.
This is especially important if there won’t be any support from the vendor once they complete the website. There are groups on campus who can help you troubleshoot issues that come up in the future, but it will expediate the process if they can get their hands on specific documentation.
Deliverable 5: If your website is hosted on an illinois.edu domain, it needs to follow the brand standards.
This means having the most recent version of our standardized header and footer, following the guidance on strategy, messaging, visual elements and more. If you’re interested in domains, you can read more on the Brand Guidelines | Web Domains page.
Bonus Pro Tip: Resource Sharing
Vendors have access to the WIGG resource library for small and big items, such as styling buttons: https://webtheme.illinois.edu/style-sheet/buttons/[hyperlink “styling buttons”]. If the vendor uses the ready-made components that are already vetted for accessibility and branding, this may reduce the work and ultimately the cost for your unit.
These are the top three resources to share with a vendor to get them started:
Additional Resources
Project Management for Marketing
Web Hosting for Marketing Decision Makers
Contact
Sydney Flowers
Front End Web Developer
Strategic Communications and Marketing