Content Strategy for Colorado University

The University of Colorado Denver is pursuing a redesign of cusouthdenver.org. I’ve been hired to do content strategy and production (writing and editing) for the project, which will be in collaboration with web and design agency BetterWeather and University Communications.

The project represents a unique set of requirements and challenges because the new site combines The Wildlife Experience—a functioning museum—with CU’s higher education offerings as a satellite location for the larger CU system. The content strategy will take into consideration the range of audiences the site will serve.

I’m starting by conducting several studies of the current site. To identify and catalogue existing content, I’ve created sitemaps for the current cusouthdenver.org site, as well as the archived website for The Wildlife Experience. From the sitemap, I’ve created a site inventory which will aid us in doing a content audit and gap analysis.

The sitemap has also served as the basis for a Card Sort exercise, which I will conduct online and onsite to ascertain both quantitative and qualitative data. The Card Sort will give us valuable feedback on how users group the content, as well as provide insights on the language for the site moving forward. This is especially important for this project, as the semantics play a critical role in combining content from the higher ed side with the educational content on the museum side. For instance, “Staff” versus “Faculty” and “Gift Shop” vs “Bookstore.”

Image: cusouthdenver.org sitemap (labels have been removed)

My role:
Content Strategist and Web Consultant

Project collaborators:
BetterWeather and CU University Communications