Higher ed websites for years have gone through a familiar life cycle:
- Colleges and universities commit large budgets to a new website, involving a new design, content management system, and content.
- A regular, much smaller budget sustains the website for many years with new content, but minimal major changes.
- The digital landscape changes and evolves, and users have new expectations of a website.
- With their website looking older and more dated every day, colleges and universities restart the process to realign with where users are now, taking another two years before they have a new site.
The process requires a mountain of work and budget, realigning stakeholder expectations, user research, not to mention the long timeline and diversion from regular business people have to conduct as well.
It’s time to stop attempting to move a mountain every couple of years. A more regular budget and evolutionary process can produce a living web presence that has the flexibility to adapt to changing expectations of the web. Rather than the extreme highs and lows or irregular, major projects, a smooth and constant process can help you better budget time and money, and extend the life of a major web redesign by building in ways to address changing needs.
Our team provided a short-take session for the annual National Council for Marketing and Public Relations (NCMPR) conference discussing how budgets can be better allocated to ensure your site is always looking fresh.
If you’d like to discuss how an evolutionary web plan could work for you, let us know!
