The consolidation of Georgia Health Sciences University with Augusta State University required the web team to create a unified website for the new Georgia Regents University in approximately three months. The team depended on hundreds of content contributors to update and maintain the content associated with their department, but without set guidelines or instruction, the website soon became a hodge-podge of content, with empty pages, duplicated (and out-of-date) content, and even some flashy 90’s-style graphics!
As Georgia Regents University changed its name to Augusta University in early 2016, the web team took advantage of the need to update most pages to also reveal a new website design, complete with guidelines for the web contributors to ensure a cohesive, accurate, and current website. These guidelines are meant to instruct, enable, and encourage content contributors in proper ways to update and maintain the new website.
This case study presents Augusta University’s Web Content Guidelines, and describes the process of determining these guidelines in a user-friendly manner. This session breaks the process into five key areas (audience, accessibility, guidelines, content, and governance) which have applications for all web content and offers suggestions as to the implementation of guidelines.
