Tres consells per redissenyar el web acadèmic

M’ha semblant interessant comentar l’article Top 3 Elements of an Award-Winning Website Redesign publicat a Inside Higher Education, que tracta dels punts principals a considerar quan es redissenya un web d’una universitat. Crec que també és aplicable a un centre de recerca, grup de recerca… i fins i tot a un web/blog personal. Naturalment es refereix més aviat a l’impacte sobre la comunitat, més que no pas a l’impacte sobre la mateixa persona o institució que desenvolupa el web. El meu blog és abans de res, per exemple, un element per retre comptes i per fer una crònica de la meva activitat, a part de donar opinió.

Diu l’IHE que hi ha tres elements clau a considerar:

  1. Reorganize navigation for your primary audiences.
  2. Prioritize time to develop engaging design and visuals.
  3. Develop content that will get “likes” and “shares”

En definitiva, es tracta d’impactar les possibles audiències, i que siguin elles qui amplifiquin el missatge per tal d’arribar a d’altres audiències. Algunes frases rellevants:

/1/ First, meet with stakeholders to determine who the primary, secondary, and tertiary audiences are for your website. Then use that information to make decisions about the new information architecture. Your primary audience should easily find information without a lot of clicking. Your internal audience benefits from having separate navigation. Then, define goals for your different pages. A goal for an internal page might be to deliver information with the least amount of clicking, while the goal for external pages is focused on conversions.

/2/ Photo and videography are the most important and time-consuming assets to develop for a website relaunch. Site users don’t want to spend a lot of time reading your website, they want to experience it. Invest in talented artists who can create arresting visuals to represent the unique offerings of your university.

/3/ Our team develops content based on a social-first strategy. Even when we are in the planning stages we are constantly asking ourselves if we would share the content or what the angle is going to be when we share it on social media. Every piece of content generated on our website debuts on social media. If you create content that you can’t share on social – what is the point of creating the content? During our relaunch, we prioritized the way that users can share our content natively. We used addthis to integrate social media share buttons on every piece of content.

Every video that we publish is uploaded natively to social media for its premiere and then posted onto our website and YouTube for discovery. Video is a powerful storytelling tool and can capture even the shortest of attention spans. It is more expensive to create, so be strategic with topics covered in this medium. Use an audience-specific approach and develop content that your audience is likely to share on social media.

Miraré de seguir aquests consells quan tindré temps per redissenyar el meu blog-web. De moment, val més mantenir el que funciona. Però cal fer-lo evolucionar.