How to Migrate Your Site

This page will help guide you through the process for moving or building your website using the Campus WCMS. Check out  Building Effective Web Pages for a good start.

Getting Started - Questions To Ask

  • Who has approval for you to create or maintain your site?
  • Who will maintain the content for your site? Who will approve the content for your site?
  • Who is your core audience? What is their primary interest in your site?
  • What is the primary mission or goal of your site?

Inventory and organize your existing site

This can be done using a simple spreadsheet. Click through your site and copy and paste each URL you land on. This works for small to medium size sites. Then, in another area of the spreadsheet, create a column for each of your new 6 top navigation items. These are the "buckets" or directories, of your site that dictate how your new site will be organized. Begin copy and pasting each of the old URLs into each of the new directories. Think about your audience and where they will expect to find each of your pages. For example, most people will expect to find your mission statement and your org chart in the "About" section of your website. Continue this process until all of the pages in your existing site have a new "home" in the new site.

This planning exercise then creates a roadmap for your work and it's now easier to track how you're progressing.

Create your content

While building a site or moving an existing site, you'll need to take a look at the content OR write new content. There are many online resources that can guide you in writing for the web but some general guidelines are:

  • Always keep in mind your audience
  • Keep it short and sweet. It's called web BROWSING, not web READING. Your audience scans your site. Use bullet lists and headings when you can
  • Write clear and simply - WebAIM has some great instructions about this
  • Link to authoritative sources of content rather than recreating it. 
  • AVOID the use of PDFs. Create a web page instead of uploading and linking to a PDF. Most users don't want to download a PDF to get information. Only use PDFs for documents that site users have to print out.

Your Home Page

Once most of your content is built out in the new WCMS site, you'll want to start thinking about what will be highlighted on the home page of your site. The temptation when building a new site is to start at the home page. But you'll soon get stuck. The home page is of a site is designed to highlight what visitors will find inside your site. So, you'll need to have the content inside the site created. 

Launch your new site

A couple of weeks before you want to make your site live, visit our page about launching your site.