OHSU

Our Redesign

After launching the new design on OHSU's top tier of pages it was time to bring the Web Strategies site up to speed.  We followed the process we recommend to others.  It's documented here as an example case.

  1. Talked to our stakeholders/Web Strategies: Our department meeting was a good opportunity to discuss the purpose of our site and what each of us felt the site was supposed to accomplish.  We were fortunate in having pretty similar visions. 
  2. Inventoried our current site: We populated the "Current Pages & Elements" tab of the content matrix with what existed on our site.  This gave us an excellent sense of what was on the site and gave us the opportunity to discuss what to keep and how to organize it. 
  3. Created a sitemap of the future: After inventorying our content we created a rough sketch of what we wanted in the site's structure.  This went through a few drafts before arriving at a final version of the sitemap.
  4. Created an inventory of the future site: This involved populating the "NEW Pages & Elements" tab of the content matrix.  We documented where content would be copied from old pages, where new content would be needed and a rough summary of what that would be, documents, images, external links, and most importantly who would be responsible for the content on that page.  Just like the sitemap the content matrix went through several drafts before arriving at a final version of the content matrix.  Even then the content matrix will need to be updated as new pages are added.  This becomes the touchstone for the structure of the site.
  5. Decide on visuals: We had promos and a splash page image already but if we hadn't we would have had to find images for these.
  6. Create wireframes for key pages: We used Visio, but we otherwise would have used word templates to create mock-ups of how the site would look. 
  7. Check for Visual Identity compliance: The promos and splash page image were checked for visual identity compliance and the content matrix reviewed again.
  8. Build the website: Using the content matrix as a guide an empty site was created in CommonSpot.  All the pages were generated with ready to use navigation and styles.
  9. Populate the blank pages with content: We worked as a team copying in old content and generating new.  This part of the process almost always takes longer than expected. Don't forget your metadata!
  10. Performed QA on the site: The site was checked for compliance to visual guidelines again as well as general usability.
  11. Site launched!