Program Pages
Last week, I talked about one of the biggest parts of my job for the past two years: writing spotlights.
The other part that competed with that for the top spot is the program pages.
These are pages giving lots of information about each program (mostly) offered by the University. We had to coordinate with the departments across campus for most of the information. We also had to contact numerous students and alumni from each program to provide quotes and full interviews.
Information provided was then plugged into a template and voila!
There were a few things that we had to adjust to accommodate subtle unique qualities for some programs, but mostly it was plug and play after we wrote up the content from the information we gathered.
These pages don’t have by-lines because they’re a different type of content. The spotlights are supposed to be more personal, so having an author named helps create that feeling.
The program pages on the other hand are meant to more uniform and technical – though still very approachable. That was something the old site lacked – approachability. I think we succeeded in bringing that in.
The other thing about these program pages is that they are owned by the Office of Communication and Marketing as opposed to the individual departments on campus. This is because they are meant to be more marketing-based.
Draw them in and then send them off to the departmental sites – which are then meant to give more in-depth information.
This has been one of the toughest things to communicate to the department heads across campus. They all want to put forward every bit of information they possibly can, but that’s not what these pages are for. There was very little prioritization of information. It was a little hard to sell since we weren’t able to do the whole Louisiana.edu family of sites in one go (that’s just not how a site redesign works for universities).
But we made it!
And on we go.