The Daugherty Water for Food Global institute used the same website from 2011-2018. The new website was launched in July 2018. The new website brought a more modern look to the website. The website is responsive, mobile friendly, and easier to navigate. It improved communication about our organization to key audiences. The website was developed along with the University of Nebraska Central Administration’s Web Application Development and Management team.

Throughout the process, I provided feedback for the new website so that it would meet the needs of our organization and its intended audiences. We started the process by identifying personas, or the different categories of users who would be visiting the website and then identified the parts of the website that would be useful to each persona. Once I provided the team with the personas, they took this information and developed a draft sitemap for the website. Analytics information from the existing website was referenced to ensure that commonly-accessed resources would be easy to access on the new website.

Once we reviewed the sitemap and made a few small changes to better align with our organization’s needs, we then moved on to create high-fidelity mockups of the new website. The process was developed at the same time as our branding update to ensure that the new branding would be compatible with the new website. The mockups went through several iterations and included several changes to help better align with our organization’s existing branding.

After we finalized the design for the website, the Web Application Development team started to develop the website. For this process, they took the high-fidelity mockups which used our branding colors and fonts to build the website. They used a module library to generate the different sections of webpages, developing new modules if the section was not already available. The team used Sitecore as the content management system, which does a good job of reusing website modules and content. Initially, the team developed the website and its pages with content that we provided to them. Along with the feedback provided throughout the web process, I also provided most of the initial content for the website, including the photos.