Best Practices

Featured Unit: College of Engineering

For years, the College of Engineering's Web site reflected their own organizational structure but, increasingly, was not addressing the needs of people using the site. To address this, the College's marketing and communications team embarked on a redesign project that culminated with the launch of their new Web site in mid-September. It not only has a new look that incorporates the UW graphic identity system, but it also is reorganized to group content by type and by audience.

The primary goals of the redesign were to:

• Represent UW Engineering as dynamic, cutting-edge field
• Encourage exploration by prospective students, faculty, recruiters, and industry partners
• Make it easier to find content
• Improve quality, accuracy, and timeliness of content
• Provide a design that departments within the College would embrace and adopt

To help guide their decisions, the team surveyed people within multiple constituent groups and audience types and conducted usability testing. To learn more about what they discovered, download this PowerPoint presentation. To see a flowchart of the project steps, download this Word document. The site is currently managed using Dreamweaver, but the team intends to move to a content management system soon. For more details, contact the project lead, Heather Hoeksema, at x61776 or hlh6@u.washington.edu.

Question of the Month

Q: I noticed some beautiful banners behind President Emmert when he gave his annual address in Kane Hall last month. Are those banners available for us to use?

A: They certainly are. You can reserve them online at no cost for up to two weeks. There are 17 different versions of the retractable banners you saw, as well as tripod stands, showcase walls, and media backdrops. They're a great way to add visual pizzazz to your events. And most of them can be easily assembled and disassembled by just one person. For more details, visit the High-Impact Displays Web site or contact displays@u.washington.edu.

Got a question for next month? Send it to mktg@u.washington.edu.

Featured Toolkits and Templates

Marketing Plan Template
Have you been asked to write a marketing plan but have no idea where to start? Our marketing plan template can help. You can use it as a guide for thinking through the key elements you'll want to have in place before you begin. This template works well for very specific plans, such as promoting an event, as well as for long-term strategies, such as marketing a new degree program. If you have questions or are interested in seeing an example of a completed marketing plan, please contact Key Nuttall at keyn@u.washington.edu or x56410.