The University of Leicester ‘website’ is actually a collection of more than 360 websites, including:

Responsibility for each website lies with the Department* in question but overall strategic responsibility for all University of Leicester websites lies with the Webteam.

Within each Department, responsibility for maintaining and updating pages and folders should be shared amongst staff as appropriate. It is not a good idea to have a single person responsible for maintaining your entire website (unless that is their full-time job, or your website is very small).

If you have responsibility for adding or updating content on any webpages we strongly recommend that you attend the half-day Writing for the Web course.

It is essential that all new websites, and all major changes to existing websites, are approved and signed off by the Webteam before the pages go live.

The importance of web communication

A website has three components: design, structure and content. But no-one visits a website for its design or structure, only for its content. Good design and good structure support content, but the content itself must be valuable.

A website is a communication tool and it communicates in two ways:

• It communicates specific information: names, dates, course descriptions. This is information that people are looking for, which answers a question or helps them to complete a task.
• It shows people what your Department is like. On top of which, every single University of Leicester website shows people what the University is like.

Your website is the main way that most people interact with you most of the time and for many people your website is your Department.

Remember:

• People visit your website before they visit the campus and before they write to you or telephone you or meet you. First impressions count.
• A good website will not necessarily attract applicants/customers but a bad website will very quickly put them off.
• A website is utterly different to a brochure or leaflet and should not simply reproduce the content of printed publications.
• Your website does not exist for you to tell people things; it exists for people to find out things about you.
• Anything which is not useful and helpful is stopping people from finding the helpful, useful stuff.
• KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.