Welcome to Web Con 2026!
Preparing for a Website Overhaul
Presenters
Sydney Flowers
Front-end Developer
StratCom
sydbeth@illinois.edu
Liz Shallenberger
UX Liaison
Technology Services
es20@illinois.edu
Dena Strong
Lead UX Liaison
Technology Services
dlstrong@illinois.edu
Huaqi Zhang
UX Liaison
Technology Services
huaqiz@illinois.edu
A successful website is more than just a fresh interface. It’s a dynamic, inclusive digital environment.
Chances are, if you’ve already concluded that you need a new website, you’ve encountered pain points with your existing site. But you have the opportunity to do so much more than just address pain points when you develop a new site. You have the opportunity to improve the overall user experience, and increase engagement.
Jumping straight into design and development without a solid foundation often leads to disjointed user experiences, accessibility barriers, and long-term maintenance headaches. In this session, we will explore why intentional, strategic planning is the most critical phase of any web design project.
Define Project Goals
Defining clear objectives and aligning your digital presence with broader organizational goals to drive meaningful, strategic change.
Content Brief
The Content Brief worksheet will help you identify those opportunities.
This worksheet will help you narrow down your unit’s audiences, needs, messaging goals, pain points, braggin’ rights, and more. It’s meant to be a flexible document, so add whatever data you think is valuable.
Benefits
- Supplies Essential Proof and Credibility: Ensure the content isn’t just fluffy language.
- Ensures Strategic Alignment and Focus: Force stakeholders to articulate their mission, vision, values, and core benefits.
- Defines and Solves for the Audience: Define pain points, needs, benefits, and common objections.
- Provides Competitive Differentiation: Compare your strengths and weaknesses against competitors.
Bonus resource
Tech Specs
To redesign or migrate your current site, you’ll need to start collecting all the site’s tech specs.
Tech specs include details like what content management system you’re using, where your domain lives, and who has admin access to your site.
- The Tech Specs worksheet is a place for you to store all of this information. It will come in handy when you meet with your development team.
- You may need to reach out to your unit IT staff to help you gather all the parts you need.
Benefits
- Ensures Smooth Migration and Access Control: Ensure teams can access, audit, and migrate existing assets without losing control of the current environment.
- Audits the CMS and External Dependencies: CMS Information section (WordPress/Drupal) is crucial for understanding the complexity of the current build.
- Mitigates Technical Risk and Cost Overruns: Every missing piece of information in this document represents a potential crisis during the redesign.
Do Your Research
A thorough audience analysis will shape your information architecture, design, content, development strategy and help narrow the project’s scope.
Audience Analysis
Answer key questions:
- Who is your audience or audiences?
- What do they care about?
- Where are they coming from?
- How are they accessing your website?
Gather this data through:
- user surveys
- feedback forms
- email threads
- current site user analytics
- word of mouth
Benefits
- Ensures Strategic Alignment and Focus: Eliminate conflicting perceptions that create inconsistency.
- Optimize Content and Design: Create clarity and solve targeted issues
- Streamlines Decision Making: Provide a true reference point for all decisions.
- Reduces Risks: Reduce wasting resources on irrelevant pages and post-launch complaints.
Assess Your Content
Content Inventory
You can start with our Content Inventory template and refine:
- Which fields will be useful for your process?
- Need a quick-start page listing? Sitemap.xml or equivalent
- What categories will help you process?
- Current, needs-updating, move, archive, delete?
Image / attachment tracking? Accessibility review? Assigned person?
- Current, needs-updating, move, archive, delete?
Benefits
- A shareable collaboration point where your team (and/or upper management) can tell what’s done, what’s in progress, and what’s on the horizon
- Revising information architecture while it’s still in a spreadsheet is much faster than after you’ve built a whole website
Bonus resource
Beyond the Inventory
A spreadsheet of site structure can also help with:
- Interface architecture assessments (Treejack et al)
- Page tables: “What should that page be doing? Is it doing that?”
- If you want pages in certain sections to have structure and/or content resemblance beyond the punctuation and terminology in an all-purpose style guide, a page table can be used to document decisions like “all news pages should have the News category applied, have a featured image of these dimensions, and [should or should not] have an inset [quote or other highlight block]”
Benefits
- If you have a problem with creeping kudzu content invasion: Requiring every web page to have a content inventory and/or page table entry explaining its existence and purpose can help control the content weeds.
Usability Assessments
Why Usability Assessments
- Charting the unknown
- Detect real-word obstacles and user frustrations
- Validates assumptions about user needs and behaviors
- Provides mission-critical evidence
- Reduces costly courses corrections once the site is live
- UX—Easier discovery-High engagement
Pairing questions to UX techniques
- First, figure out what you want to learn
- Then match your assessment techniques to that
- UX analysis spreadsheet of “if you wonder about X, try Y” usability approaches
- Some of these you can do on your own
- Some we have tools to help you with (like Optimal Workshop)
UX Helpers
- UX Lunch Club: Third Thursdays at 1 pm Central
- WCoE Open Office hour: Every other Wednesday 11 -12 PM cst
- Optimal Workshop: UX assessments with no schedule hassles and automatic data updating
- Survey: “I don’t think that word means what you think it means”
- Card sorting: “How should we organize and label that?”
- Tree test: “Did we organize it right (for purposes X/Y/Z)?”
Accessibility
Why Accessibility
- Purpose
- Accessibility is not an add on
- Ensures that all visitors can access and interact with your content
- Improves SEO, mobile experience, and overall satisfaction for all users
- Approach
- Manual & Automated
Build accessibility into content workflow
- Heading
- Follow a logical hierarchy (H1 → H2 → H3).
- Links
- Use descriptive phrases (“View admissions requirements”, not “click here”)
- Images
- Write concise, meaningful alt text that conveys the image’s purpose.
- Multimedia
- Always include captions or transcripts for videos and audio.
Accessibility: It Takes a Team
- Content creators: Accessiblity’s foundation
- Departmental IT Accessibility Liaisons
- Digital accessibility office hour (second Tuesday 1-2 pm)
- Explore with Hadi (second Tuesdays at 11 am)
- Investigating new tools like Editoria11y
Time
Docs and training for your content creators
Do you have…
- A departmental style guide?
- Page/block templates or patterns they can copy?
- Training on Editoria11y (WP/Drupal) &/or accessible creation guidance?
- Photo standards/sizes? (ideally with metadata containing names/dates/places? Photoshelter includes that)
Do you have…
- A list of active plugins or addons and what each of them does for you?
- Which of them costs $$, and who renews the license on what schedule?
- A regular update schedule?
- Have you tested your backups lately?
- Have you reviewed who has admin access to the server? The CMS?
Benefits
- Write once, share many
- Train more trainers and reduce the individual load
- Nobody should be the only person who knows how to do something
Resilience and Future-proofing
Do you have a plan for…
- If the budget crisis cancels your cloud storage or hosting system?
- If the CEO loses his cool, then the “social” part of social media?
- (RIP public access to Twitter and therefore many campus websites’ feeds)
- If the federal government cuts your grant? (Tamagotchi to Pet Rock)
- If the Internet Archive loses lawsuits or power?
- If Amazon US East 1 goes down?
Benefits
- Helps mitigate disaster recovery
- Helps identify alternative options
Serving Sustainably
Do you have a plan for…
- When a key plugin / visualization stops being updated?
- Have you tried turning them off on purpose to see what you have left?
- Low to no animation/video options?
- (Both a11y “low motion requested” and rural / Global South bandwidth limits)
- Going viral / a Homecoming surge?
- Static copies / caches / Cloudfront?
- Migrating to the next CMS in 5 years? Archiving and / or retiring the site?
Benefits
- Future you will thank present you for choosing open standards over vendor-proprietary formats
- Future accessibility checkers will thank present you for creating more HTML and Word and less PDF
- Both global viewers and folks with disabilities will thank you for low-bandwidth content options that honor low-motion settings in the OS
- Homecoming and Graduation marketing teams (and unexpectedly adorable fluffy pet research that goes viral) will thank you for helping mitigate massive waves of attention on particular pages and sites
