Overview
Western's policy and procedures site serves as a resource for finding relevant policies, looking up policies by category or status, and pointing users to policy owners. It also lists relevant procedures, standards, and other guidance related to policies.
Goal
The policy website was a site with a large volume of PDF documents. Remediating hundreds documents to meet accessibility guidelines and incorporating that into the workflow would be time-consuming. It can also come with a cost if documents needed to go through a remediation vendor due to their complexity or volume.
The goal of the policy's site migration was to offer a web-first format of policies, rather than site owners continuing to upload multiple documents. A web-first approach meant minor revisions could be made in the content itself, rather than a whole new document uploaded. It would also increase the site performance, since webpages are typically smaller file sizes than PDF documents and faster to load. It would also be easier to track web accessibility in the policy pages, and make changes accordingly.
The site also needed policies to be easy to maintain and fill in info, without the editors having to make decisions about formatting or structure each time a new policy was added. Print styles also needed to be considered and kept, in case policies were printed for policy review.
Strategy
WebTech worked on a demo content type to collect certain types of policy info, and provided a policy page display that has most of its structure built in. Once approved, the rest of the policy content got moved into the template. The site owner can set and fill in the policy based on category, who owns the policy, effective and revised dates, and status among other choices.
The policy type comes with a pre-built layout using Layout Builder and views, which helps manage the page structure and its overall accessibility. The site also included a new "All Policies" page, which lists them in entirety and comes with a search feature so users can filter policies by keywords if they don't know the title or number of a policy.
Work is underway to move the rest of the content to web-based formats, like procedures, standards, and guidelines.
Results
- The move from document-first to web-first policy pages meant more responsive and user-friendly policy content that is easier to navigate, from smaller devices to large screens.
- Policy pages have a more consistent structure and design that adheres with the university's branding.
- There are fewer policy document uploads, so the number of policy documents the platform needs to host is much fewer.
- The policy's pre-built layout helps site editors focus on building out policy content, rather than having to also format and design document standards.