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• Use case: In general, if you need a digital marketing home for public content that supports an approved CU Boulder goal, a Web Express site might be the right tool. If you think Web Express might not be the right tool for your needs, 
• Site types: Review the list of acceptable site types on Web Express and see if your needs fit into one of these categories.
• Maintenance: Managing and maintaining a website requires time and attention. Make sure you have team members that can dedicate the time and attention to managing and maintaining a website on an ongoing basis.
• Existing sites: Consider if there is already another CU Boulder website that would be a more appropriate home for your content. Think about it from your audience’s perspective and what might make most sense for them. You can always reach out to websupport@colorado.edu if you’re unsure if there’s an existing site that might work better for your content.

The Basics

• Plan your site strategy: Use your business goals and any available research to inform the strategy for your site. This will help you think about your site as a strategic tool to support your audiences’ journey.  LinkedIn Learning courses are available to all CU Boulder staff, faculty and students.
• Create your site structure: Using your site strategy and business goals, create the structure for your site. If you’re unfamiliar with information architecture, 
• Content creation: Use your site’s information architecture to begin creating the content you’ll need to build your site, such as copy, photos, videos, etc.

More Advanced Steps

• Research: If you have resources available, consider conducting research to inform your site strategy, information architecture and content plan. This might include conducting a peer analysis, stakeholder interviews or user journeys, among many other types of research.
• Content audit: If you are redesigning an existing site or merging multiple existing sites together, consider conducting a content audit, which is a systematic review of all of a website's content, including its performance, quality and how well it is supporting business goals. If you would like a download of an existing site’s content to conduct an audit, reach out to websupport@colorado.edu.

• Demo site: Check out the Web Express demo site to get a better sense of the foundational elements that the tool employs.
• Training site: Request a training site to get into the platform
• Tutorials and documentation: Check out our tutorials and documentation for hands-on training.

Request form: Once you’ve learned how to use Web Express, complete the site request form to request a sandbox site to begin building your site. Note that this is different from a training site, which is only used for training and to get hands-on experience with the platform before diving into a production site.

Site building: If your site request was approved, you’ll receive a sandbox site where you can use the content you created in Step 2 to build your pages. You will be able to share this site with other stakeholders for reviews and approvals as you’re working on it.

• Pre-launch checklist: Review the pre-launch checklist to make sure your site is ready to go.
• Submit a launch request: Once you feel like your site is ready to go live, submit the . Be sure to account for 5-10 business days for your request to make it through the launch process.

• Maintain: After your site is launched, maintain the content to ensure it’s accurate and up-to-date.
• Audit: Periodically do a site health check to evaluate your site and ensure it’s still supporting your business goals, including checking your links, doing an accessibility check and cleaning up unneeded content and users .
• Analyze and optimize: Consider adding Google Analytics to your site to get a better understanding of how users are actually navigating and interacting with your site.