Redeveloping Your Website: Asking the Right Questions, Finding the Right Partner

How do you know when you need to do something about your website?

Maybe youve heard from your admissions team that the site doesnt stack up against your peer or competitor institutions. Maybe faculty members have spoken up about much-needed services. Incoming freshman may have pointed out holes in the information they were searching for last spring. Maybe visitors arent using the site the way you want them to. Or maybe the site is just dated and ready for attention.

For many of our colleagues in education, deciding that its time for a website redesign isnt hard. The challenge is figuring out how to get started. A successful website redesign requires funding, executive-level support, campus-wide buy-in, and thousands of hours of involvement from faculty, staff, and students from throughout the community. For the small group or individual charged with getting the ball rolling, the hurdles can seem impossibly high, even if your institution is a small and close-knit independent or professional school.

mStoner has completed hundreds of web development projects with schools, colleges, and universities of all sizes, and were the first to admit that theres no single, magic solution.

To help clarify some of the basic decisions you need to make-and to help you know where to go from there-we wrote “Redeveloping Your Website: Asking the Right Questions, Finding the Right Partner.” Our white paper lays out some of the questions you need to ask about your needs and how you might begin to approach them. Some projects don’t need help from outside vendors or consultants, but if yours does, the white paper suggests how you can find the right partner to meet your needs.

For a copy of this white paper, contact Katie Jennings (katie.jennings(at)mStoner.com) and she’ll be happy to send you one.

And if you’ve read “Redeveloping Your Website: Asking the Right Questions, Finding the Right Partner,” please contribute your thoughts and comments about the issues it addresses in the comments to this post.