Website Documentation, Standards, Policies and Procedures

Content Hygiene

Our website is only as good as the information it delivers. Outdated, inaccurate or incomplete information does a disservice to the users. The structure of the website is designed to make it as easy as possible for stakeholders to make updates and corrections. Each section of the website has a button in the top right corner to log-in using single sign-on and submit a modification of the content. The modification is sent to the document’s approver and a web content specialist for timely approval before being published.

In this way, we give you the power and responsibility for keeping the information on the university website up to date and accurate. The aim is to make it faster and easier to make a correction or update yourself than to email someone else asking them to do it.

Stakeholders and Approvers

Each document on the site (pages, programs, FAQs, sections, research pages) will have multiple stakeholder groups and a single reviewer group.
Stakeholder groups are departments, sections of departments, committees or other groups of people with an interest in making sure the content on these documents is accurate and up to date. Family Weekend is a good example. We can have as many as we want and recognize as many people as we want for each.

Each stakeholder taxonomy has a list of associated people which can be managed in the stakeholder edit pages. This page shows all of the stakeholder groups, each of the individuals in the group and how many of each kind of document is associated with that stakeholder group. The information can be edited directly from this page using inline editing. Clicking on any of the numbers on the right will give you a list of all of the documents of that type that are associated with that stakeholder.

All stakeholder individuals will be emailed whenever a change is made to a document they are associated with. The email will contain the what the document used to say compared to what it says now. It will also contain the names and contact information for all of the people involved in making the modifications, who all of the stakeholders are and a link to make another modification or comment on that document. Comments on that document can be sent to all stakeholders or to individuals.

Approvers are the primary stakeholder of the content. This is frequently the department head, the director of a program, or even a recruiter. The approver list is by job title such as “Department Head for Curriculum and Instruction” and then the individual's profile is associated with the job title. In some situations, there can be more than one person associated with the single Approver Title. Both will be notified about approving the modification but only one of the people will need to approve a modification for it to be published. If one of the people associated with the approver taxonomy for a specific document submits a modification to that document, they will not be asked to approve the document as part of the approval process, it will skip the approver step and go directly to the editor to review and publish.

In order to keep information up to date and accurate approvers will also periodically send emails asking them to verify the information on individual documents. Probably about once a year per document. The email will give context to where the document appears on the website, how frequently it is viewed, and when it was last updated. There will be a link for each document inviting them to make a modification. Stakeholders will also be sent these documents to review but on a less frequent schedule or in a more digestible format.