Planning Your Site

Things To Consider

Who will visit your site?

Spend a bit of time considering who you want to visit your site.  The most effective websites are tailored to specific audiences, to make it easy for them to quickly locate the information they want. Audiences could include:

What pages do you want on your site?

Consider what standard pages you want for your website. Here are some examples:

How will you organize your content?

WordPress makes it very easy to quickly create content. That can be a mixed blessing. If you go overboard creating content, your visitors may drown in it trying to find the one piece of information they’re looking for. Planning the organization of your content and keeping it clean and navigable is critical for a successful site

Will you write a blog?  Do you have the time?

Blogs can require a lot of effort. If you start a blog and then pause in posting, or stop altogether, visitors may look at the date of your last blog entry and assume the site has been abandoned.

How will visitors contact you?

It is always good to provide information for how site visitors can contact you. Consider where you want your contact information to appear.

Menus

Most sites, depending on the theme used. The CALS theme allows for up to two menu options: a main horizontal site navigation menu and a smaller resource menu above right of the main menu. You don’t have to use the smaller resource menu, but it is a secondary option if needed.

For the main horizontal site navigation menu, the CALS theme also allows for three-levels of drop-downs sub menus. The parent entry that displays all the time, and up to two additional child menus that display when you hover the cursor over the parent (top-level) menu item. It is best practice not to have too many nested sub-menu items within your main site navigation, but this option can help you organize your content in a hierarchy, and also reduce the amount of top-level parent navigation items.

The main horizontal site navigation menu in the CALS theme is designed to be mobile responsive at different browser breakpoints. This means that depending on the screen browser width, it will look differently to accommodate smaller screen size on mobile devices. This is by design. One thing to be careful of is adding too many long top-level menu titles; if the menu exceeds the screen width, the menu will automatically adjust and be replaced by a three-bar (hamburger) mobile icon next to the site title in the upper left.

There are various best practices for menu organization, but the most common options are either organized alphabetically or in order of importance from left to right. Also using the sub-menu options in the CALS theme can help with organizing your content hierarchically into related areas.

Design Tip: If you have a number of pieces of content, you can create an affinity diagram – write the name of each piece of content on a sticky note, and then lay out the sticky notes.  Step back and consider them, and patterns will start to emerge. Group the sticky notes together and come up with a parent menu title for them.  These can become your parent/child menu entries. For navigation menu titles, the shorter the better.

Subpages

In WordPress you can also organize your pages as subpages to create a parent/child relationship between the pages themselves. This will help you organize your page content on the back-end, and will also reflect the relationship of the pages through the URL. For example: https://cals.wisc.edu/about-cals/history/ In this example, “History” is a sub-page of the “About CALS” page, and so that relationship is reflected in the URL.

Photography

If you want to include photos on your website, consider the following:

• Where you will acquire the photos? It is best to NOT download photos off the web unless you have permission. Also depending on the context and situation, using stock photos is also often not a good solution. CALS External Relations, and UW-Madison both curate a collection of high quality photos so reach out to us and we can provide additional details.
  • CALS Flickr Library Note that most of the photos are privately accessible, so contact us for more information.
  • UW-Madison Photo Library This photo library is accessible with a UW NetID.
• Where you will use the photo ‐ on a particular page, or in the header slides on the homepage
• If the photo will be used in the banner, is the image resolution high enough? For a banner / hero image a resolution of > 1600px width is best.
• Does the photo need to be prepped ‐ cropped, adjusted for contrast, focus, color
• WordPress has issues managing large number of photos (e.g. hundreds). If you plan on having large numbers of photos, please contact us to discuss other solutions.

Additional Features

Will you need to store and list a large number of files (pdfs, docs, etc.)?

If you need to store large numbers (hundreds) of files, please contact us to discuss other solutions for organization and clarity.

Will you include a staff directory?

For sites that need to manage and display a large number of people, we have a custom Directory plugin that can help provide the ability to display and filter a people contact directory. To learn more about this feature, see Add a Directory in our How-To section, or contact us to activate the plugin on your website.

Do I need a web form to collection information?

There are several considerations when deciding to create a web form. We have several form tools available. Gravity Forms, Google Forms, MS Forms, and Qualtrics are all survey/web form tools available at UW-Madison that can be used with your website, but the recommended tool will depend on the information you want to collect. Please reach out to us if you would like to add a web form to your website and we can provide guidance and training.

Additional Site Editors/Administrators

When we initially set up your website, we will need the names and NetIDs of all people you want to be able to edit the site, and the level of access you want them to have, e.g. Admin (full) or Editor (manage content only). Once we have added you as a Site Administrator, you can then further add and manage those that you need to edit your site.

Choosing a Domain Name

The domain name is the name visitors enter in the browser to find your site. Our team will work with you to choose a domain name and work with DoIT host managers to setup and configure the domain when you are ready for your website to go live.

We full control for to approve domains within the *.cals.wisc.edu namespace, and can also submit domain requests for other *.wisc.edu domains.

If you want a *.wisc.edu domain name (without .cals in it), we can work on your behalf to submit a domain request to University Strategic Communication for approval of the domain.

Themes

We provide several choices of UW branded WordPress themes. The theme controls the look and feel of the site, including color, fonts, and page layout options. Our latest CALS version 4 theme uses the Gutenberg Block Editor and numerous other features designed for cross browser/device responsiveness, and digital accessibility. For a sample of this theme and block-element layout options, please visit our kitchen sink of examples. The CALS theme can also provide some branding flexibility for special research and grant funded project with cross institutional partners where UW branding needs to be minimized.

All websites at UW-Madison must meet the minimum web requirements established by the University and the Office of Strategic Communication that include UW branding, GDPR compliance, and for compliance with digital accessibility policy. The CALS and UW Theme take care of all of this for you so you can focus on creating and maintaining your content and communicating with your website visitors.