New Web Managers
Whether you are a graduate assistant, work study, office manager, or faculty member, being charged with the responsibility of website administrator for your academic department or unit can be a daunting task. To simplify your onboarding experience, follow these steps:
Subscribe to the WebFirst Newsletter
WebFirst is a bimonthly newsletter from Digital Design and Development to keep University of Arkansas web managers and content contributors informed on the latest web and digital content trends, policies and best practices through blog posts, how-to documents and training.
Training
We offer multiple training options to not only get you accustomed to managing your webpages but also help you to make them the best they can be from basic CMS training with Omni CMS 101 and 102 training to accessibility, content strategy, analytics and more.
Attend Quarterly WebFirst Community Meetings
The WebFirst Community Group meetings are an effort to bring all campus web content contributors together to collaborate and share standards, tools and resources as well as provide feedback from the web community. The group will meet quarterly. These meetings are informational, conversational, focusing on best practices and web-based initiatives on our campus. Next meeting TBD.
Locate and Contact Your Webmaster
Find and contact your college webmaster and let them know that you’ve been assigned the responsibility of maintaining your unit’s website. They will be a valuable resource as you get started. Ask them if there is a listserv or regular meeting of other admins in their area, and if they offer additional training. Being part of a community of web administrators will allow you to bild off of each other’s knowledge and give you the confidence to ask questions and try things you might not have otherwise.
Explore Additional Tech Tools
There are tools available to webmasters that allow content to stream seamlessly from other services like Newswire, the catalog of studies, and the faculty/staff directory that will make your life much easier. Ask your webmaster about:
- Newswire news feed on your site filtered by category
- Event feed filtered by tags like location, department or subject
- Catalog of studies listing of degree requirements
- Course descriptions from catalog of studies
- Glossary of web terms