Define your audience(s)

Think about your audience or audiences – they will have certain characteristics and preferences.  Consider whether they are:

• Prospective students.  Are they undergraduate or postgraduate? Taught or research? Are they mature students who are returning to study? Perhaps they are part time or distance learning?   Are they international students?  Will they be coming straight from having completed undergraduate degrees?

• Current students.  Again, are they undergraduate or postgraduate?  Taught or research?  Are they doing a joint degree with another department?  What time of year is it?  Is it the start of term or exam season?
• Academics.  Are they from your department or another university?  Do they want to collaborate over research?  Are they looking for job vacancies?
  
• Research funding bodies.
• Press and media. 
• Parents.

Etc..  You'll probably identify many different audiences for your web site.  The trick is to identify those audiences which are most important to your department at this point in time and focus on them.  For example, is it important for your department to improve student recruitment?  In which case, you should focus on prospective students.  Is it important for your department to improve its research profile?  In this case, you should focus on academics, funding bodies and the press as your key audiences.

Work up a profile of your key audience or audiences and prioritise them.

Consider goals

The next step is to consider each of your most important audiences in turn and think about the tasks that they might want to carry out using your web site.  What are their goals?  Why do people visit your site?  What are the two or three most important pieces of information that they are likely to be looking for?  It helps if you put yourself in their position.  Does your web site provide them with what they need to know quickly and easily?  If you have time, you can approach individuals from each audience group and ask them about the tasks they would normally carry out on your web site.  Once they have suggested three to five tasks, ask them to prioritise the tasks.  You can then work this up in to a 'top ten' list of tasks that people carry out on your web site.

Your 'top ten' list of user goals then gives you a focus around which to target the content, structure and design of your web site.

Finally, consider the goals that your department has for your web site.  What do you have to communicate?  What to you want to achieve?  Do you have a particular course to market?  What makes you different to similar departments in other universities?  Do you want to improve your on-line service to current students?  These goals should always be secondary to the user’s goals.

Check out the competition 

Looking at your competitor's web sites can be an excellent source of inspiration and ideas.  Especially because it puts you in the position of being a user of a similar web site to your own.  You'll quickly identify those aspects of the site that you like and the things that you definitely don't like!  If the site has any useful facilities or features, consider whether you might want to include something similar on your own site.