Student Affairs Units

Site Admin Users Guide

Your office website is one component of the Division of Student Affairs web presence. Although each unit’s web pages are managed independently, they are designed to appear to visitors as one cohesive website for the whole division.

As the unit web admin, you shape the web visitor’s experience. Both visually and through tone of messaging, each unit website should be consistent across the division. This user’s guide provides you with the resources you need to update and maintain your office’s web pages effectively.

How to use this guide

Content Strategy

Consult this page to ensure your pages are aligned with the vision, not just for your office, but with the division’s goals. The 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.

If you still have questions, please contact Student Affairs MarComm.

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.

It also includes guidelines specific to to the division such as how to get approval to use images on the website.

Tutorials

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.

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

Video Library

Any training session recordings will be available in the training videos section.

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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…