Plan Your Kick-Off Meeting

Plan a kick-off meeting with your stakeholders if your faculty or department has decided to either:

Rewrite and migrate their old website as part of the Web Renewal Project.
Create or update major sections of your current website. (For example: Your faculty is hosting a special conference and wants to create pages to promote the conference.)

Send Meeting Invitations

People to invite to this meeting may include:

Your project sponsor (i.e., The person(s) you report to and who have the authority to assign resources to your web project.)
Web Manager from the Communications Department
Manager of Web Services from Information Services
Content experts (i.e., Staff who wrote information for your current site or who know the information you wish to add to your site.)

In your meeting invitation, ask these people to bring examples of websites they like which are similar to yours. (Reviewing these sites encourages discussion and helps to identify what to include in the new site.)

Prepare for the Meeting

To determine how well your site is currently meeting your needs and your users needs, you need to look at your web analytics or web server logs. These documents contain the following information:

How many unique users come to your site each month.
The most and least popular pages on your site.
Where your users came from before they arrived at your site and what page they last saw before leaving your site.
How long users stayed on your site and how many pages they viewed.
What information they downloaded or uploaded.

You will refer to the information in your web analytics report or server log to identify your audience and their top tasks during your kick-off meeting.

Note: Web analytics will be available on all sites once they are migrated into the new web content management system. If you have an older site, you may not have any measurement systems in place.

Record Decisions Made During Meeting

Usability.gov (an initiative of the U.S. Federal Government) created a kick-off meeting checklist (157 KB) you can refer to when identifying what should be discussed at your first meeting. Topics include:

What faculty/department/organizational goals your website should achieve.
What measures you will use to determine if you have met your goals identified in step 1.
Features you wish to incorporate from your favourite sites.
Who are your users, their requirements and what they want to do on your site. (Researching user profiles is explored further under Define User Characteristics.)
Roles and responsibilities of people working on the project, including who has final authority and sign off.
Project details, such as how often the team will meet, how decisions will be recorded, and project milestones and timelines.
Site maintenance and update after launch.

For an example of the decisions made during the University's pilot web project with Social Work, please contact Communications.