The process begins with an assessment of your current site. We look at existing pages and the statistics on visits to those pages. An important part of the assessment phase of the process is identifying the audiences for your site.
Usually, there are multiple audiences. The most common are prospective students, students, parents, faculty/staff and alumni, but they can often include educators, visitors and community members among others.
Users come to your site looking for specific information. Analysis of the current web logs can help determine the types of information people are trying to find. You can help them quickly find it by employing a sensible navigation scheme and by writing for the web.
Visitors are trying to complete a specific task: find a course description, apply for admission, locate an office address or contact a professor. Once you know what they are trying to do, you can tailor the navigation to those tasks.
Are there important dates or deadlines your audiences need to know about? Is there a process they need to go through to request specific information? To get your message across, it is important to write concisely and make sure users are able to access that information easily.