Student Affairs Marketing

Site Admin Users Guide

The Division of Student Affairs web presence is made up of an ecosystem of sites, one for each office. Each unit’s web pages are managed independently but are designed to appear to visitors as one cohesive website for the whole division.

As part of the Student Affairs MarComm team, you shape the web visitor’s experience by supporting the units to maintain consistency, both visually and through tone of messaging. This user’s guide provides you with the resources you need to update the division site and support the unit admins to effectively maintain their office’s web pages. [tk content: update link]

How to use this guide

Content Strategy

Consult this page to ensure your pages are aligned with the division’s overall communication strategy. The web content strategy you see below was approved by SALT.

This site is a research-based solution designed to address a lot of the concerns that were expressed by students, staff, and SALT. If you have questions on why parts of the site look and function the way they do, the strategy section below may answer them.

Guidelines

The Best Practices & Guidelines section of this guide is exactly that—recommendations on what to do to make sure your site visitors’ needs are met, including web accessibility compliance and standardization across the WashU web ecosystem.

Your website is built with WordPress blocks — components used for creating and editing elements in a post or page. Different block types are available in the WordPress editor to add text, media files, and layout elements, giving you more flexibility to build content.

Tutorials

Refer to the blocks section of this guide for step-by-step tutorials that includes:

• How to use each kind of block, and
• Why you would want to use that block or when you shouldn’t use that block

Video Library

Any training session recordings will be available in the training videos section of this guide, if there are videos specific only to the SA MarComm admins. If videos are for all unit admins, they will be on the training video section of the Unit Site Admin Guide.

The Unit Admin User’s Guide

The unit admins have their own User’s Guide. This SA MarComm guide is more robust, offering tutorials for every WordPress block while the other is limited to tutorials on the blocks the unit admins need to maintain the content on their site (ex. text and image edits).

Editing the unit guide

You have editing access to the Unit Admin User’s Guide. We’ve included a section in this guide on Managing the unit guide.

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Content Strategy

Site Goals

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Key Audiences

Behaviorally, audiences fall into two categories:

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Solution

From in-depth research that included workshops with site stakeholders (students, staff, SALT), the most important priorities were identified. Detailed findings from the research and discovery phase are available here.

This solution balances the needs of the units to manage their own content while also creating a unified space for the division to tell its story. It also contextualizes the resources provided by the division within each office. And, it includes robust site navigation within each office as well as across the division.

However, the technical system is only as good as its people in delivering a holistic Division of Student Affairs web experience.

This is where you come in…