Additional Resources

Developing Great Content

USF serves many different audiences, and each of these audiences has distinct needs. Your challenge is to identify your unit's audiences, understand what they need from you, develop content that meets those needs, and post that content in the right place.

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Different Audiences, Different Content, Different Homes 

Website
  • Purpose: to market your unit's offerings to the public
  • Audience: prospective students and their families, alumni, donors, job seekers, sports fans, patients, campus visitors, legislators, the media and vendors
  • Content: information about academic programs, admissions requirements, financial aid, housing, dining, parking, visiting campus and much more.
Instructional Content Server
  • Purpose: to aid faculty in providing quality online academic instruction
  • Audience: faculty and current students
  • Content: online course content
Applications Server
  • Purpose: to provide additional functionality to websites and portal sites
  • Audience: varies
  • Content: applications (online forms and the databases that support them)

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Content for External Audiences Belongs on Your Website

Your website is a tool that helps you market your unit's offerings to the public鈥揳lso known as your external audiences.

External audiences include all website visitors who do NOT have a USF NetID, including prospective students and their families, alumni, donors, job seekers, sports fans, patients, campus visitors, legislators, the media and vendors, to name a few. Content for external audiences includes academic program information, admissions requirements and processes, financial aid and scholarship information, maps, directions, parking information, job postings and much more. You should plan to migrate this type of content into the CMS so that it displays on your website, which is designed specifically to feature content for external audiences.

Content for Internal Audiences Belongs on Your Portal Site

In contrast, your portal site is a tool that helps you serve the needs of university insiders鈥揳lso known as your internal audiences. The purpose of your portal site is to help these insiders conduct their university business.

Internal audiences include only those individuals who have a USF NetID. This group is strictly limited to current students and university employees, such as faculty and staff.

Content for internal audiences includes access to university business systems (GEMS, OASIS, etc.), internal announcements, HR forms and more. This information is password protected and is not available to the general public.

You should plan to migrate this type of content into your portal site, which is designed specifically to feature content for internal audiences. A portal site is different from a team site. A team site is a collaboration tool for teams working on a specific project. In contrast, a portal site is an intranet site meant to serve internal audiences.

Note: you may migrate your internal content to the USF CMS until the portal is live. IT Web Services will work with you directly to move internal content to the portal once it is available.

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Instructional Content and Applications Do Not Live in the CMS

In addition to the content that lives on websites for external audiences, and content that lives in the portal for internal audiences, all instructional technology will live on a separate server dedicated to housing these modules.

Finally, applications, such as online forms and the databases that are behind them, will live in a separate space as well and will not migrate to the USF CMS.

Audience Identification + Needs Analysis = Personas

One of the most popular ways to identify your audiences and to determine audience needs is to create personas. It's simple: Just think about who your unit serves.

For example, do you serve prospective students? If so, are they undergraduate? Graduate? International? Are they high achievers? First generation? In-state? Out-of-state? Keep asking yourself questions until you get a really clear picture of who you are serving. Once you answer these questions for each of audiences you serve, then create a persona for each one.

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Meet Suzie-Student Audience Example 

For example, you might create a persona named Suzie. Suzie is an incoming freshman. She's 18 years old, she's a high achiever who's been admitted to the honors college, and she's moving here from out of state, after visiting USF only once two years ago.

Now think about what Suzie needs from you. Remember, Suzie doesn't know USF. She's never been to college before, and she's only visited campus once. Everything is new to her; she's not familiar with higher ed terminology, much less our university acronyms, so it's important to speak clearly in layman's terms that Suzie understands. And she's not familiar with the campus, so it's important to help her find her way.

What are some things Suzie might hope to find on your website? If you are Parking and Transportation Services, Suzie will hope to find maps, directions, parking information and details about the shuttle bus system. If you are Undergraduate Research, Suzie will hope to find information about how she can get involved in research, including checklists, contact information and more.

If you complete the persona development process for each of your audiences, then you will have a clear understanding of who your audiences are and what each one needs from you. And that will help you to develop great content and to post it in the right place. The bottom line: It's all about Suzie.

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What About Existing Content?

So now you understand who your key audiences are, and you know what they need from you. That means you're ready to develop some great new web content. But what about the existing content housed on your current website? What do you do with all that? Do you keep it? Do you throw it away and start over?

This is where a content audit comes in. Simply create a spreadsheet of all the content that is currently on your website. Include all text, photos, videos, PDF docs, RSS feeds, etc.

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Say Goodbye to Out-of-Date, Redundant and Bad Content

Now go through the list and strike out any content that is out-of-date, redundant or just plain bad. This might include an event listing from two years ago, content that you've repeated on multiple pages, or poor-quality text and photos.

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Move Applications, Internal and Instructional Content Elsewhere

In addition, you should isolate anything that is still valuable, but simply not appropriate for a website. This might include internal content you want to move into your portal site, or instructional content and applications that live on other servers. Create a separate spreadsheet for each of these types of content and move those items accordingly.

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Things to Keep in Mind

Just because you got rid of the worst of it, doesn't mean your content is ready to go. You still have some work to do to ensure that the content you post is working for you, not against you. Remember: If your site is cluttered with random, poor-quality content that doesn't help your audience do what they came to do, then your site doesn't work.

To that end, every word, link, feed, article, photo, video and graphic element on every page of your site should serve a very specific purpose鈥攖o help your audience find what they are looking for and complete the tasks they came to complete. Anything that doesn't serve this purpose should be eliminated. And everything that makes the cut needs to be made "web-friendly."

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Preparing Content for Websites

Back in the day, when the web was new, communications people simply copied content out of their latest brochure and pasted it onto their website. Great idea, right? Wrong.

Why? Because site visitors are looking for timely, accurate, accessible information, and they want it fast. They will not meander around your site like they might do when they are reading a magazine. In fact, studies show that, in a best-case scenario, we only read 28 percent of the text on a web page (Nielsen Norman Group, 2008).

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Web-Friendly Content

To develop web-friendly content, keep these tips in mind:

  • Make sure your content is high quality. Poor quality text, photos and graphics makes your unit seem incompetent and   unprofessional, and it harms your credibility.
  • Make sure your content is relevant. Don't add content just "to fill the space." Every element on every page must serve a purpose and be relevant to your audience.
  • Limit content to one topic per page. If your visitor is on an academics page, then they shouldn't be reading about housing. Content needs to be hyper-focused to help your audience find what they need.
  • Keep your text concise. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
  • Lead with the most important details. Follow with supporting details. End with related information.
  • Don't use words your audience doesn't understand, including technical jargon, acronyms and the like. Use common words and phrases.
  • Use headings and bullet points to break up long blocks of text. This makes it easy for site visitors to scan and quickly find what they are searching for.
  • Don't post irrelevant content. External audiences will be annoyed if you clutter up your page with things they don't care about, in the place of things they desperately need.
  • Include a call to action.