Web Manager's Playbook

The Web Manager’s Playbook is a comprehensive guide designed to assist web managers across Carnegie Mellon in effectively managing and maintaining university websites. It serves as a resource for understanding and implementing key principles like brand consistency, information architecture, accessibility and user experience—all of which play a critical role in ensuring that һ��'s online presence remains effective and user-friendly.

As a working document, this playbook is continually evolving to provide the latest best practices, guidelines and practical tools to support web managers in maintaining high-quality, accessible and well-organized websites that align with һ��’s mission and values. By following these recommendations, you can improve the overall performance and impact of your website.

Explore by Topic

If you're new to web management, read each section below to dive deeper into best practices. Or, if you're an experienced user, simply leaf through any topic that you may need to brush up on. Plus, find key takeaways at the beginning of each topic that help to frame the big picture.

Topic 1: Content Strategy

Key Takeaways

Identify your target audience and be specific! Consider their needs, challenges and what they're expecting to achieve on your site.
Set intentional goals for your site, and evaluate them through the lens of your target audience. Are your goals serving your audience?
Revisit your strategy over time by regularly evaluating your site's performance as it relates to your goals.

What is a Content Strategy?

A content strategy is a comprehensive plan that maps how you will create, manage, distribute and archive content in order to meet your audience’s needs and achieve your unit’s goals. Content strategy can include audience research, content creation, site performance and maintenance.

Why You Should Care

By aligning content with audience needs, a well-defined content strategy ensures that the right messages reach the right audience at the right time. A cohesive content strategy can:

Increase user engagement, brand consistency and overall website performance.
Enhance SEO efforts and drive traffic.
Streamline workflows, reduce redundancy and lead to more effective and efficient web management.

How to Use a Content Strategy

Review existing content — Audit the content you currently have on your site. If you are creating a new site, are there any important documents that have been written that you can rework for the web?
Identify your audience — Be sure to research who your target audience is — and be specific. Find what information you need, what frustrates them and what they might expect to find on your site.
Set your goals — It is important that you document your goals for the site. You will revisit this often, whether in presenting it to others or when evaluating your site's performance. How do your goals serve your audience?
Develop your strategy — Outline the content that needs to be created, when it will be published and how you might promote it on other platforms. This makes it easier to align your content with key dates or campaigns.
Structure your content — As you create content, make sure to use headings to group content, bullet points for lists and clear, concise language.
Use consistent writing style — Keep a consistent voice and tone for your content: һ�� uses .
Identify your main calls to action (CTAs) — What links are important to your target audience? Is there a particular action you want site visitors to take? Be sure to identify your most important CTAs so that you can emphasize them in your design.
Don't be afraid to iterate — A good content strategy takes time and iteration. You likely won't create a perfect strategy the first time, but that's okay! Keep evaluating your site's performance, and adjust your strategy over time.

Topic 2: SEO & Keywords

Key Takeaways

Conduct keyword research so that you can use keywords strategically in your content.
Optimize your content so that your audiences can better find your content and quickly identify its relevance.
Regularly review your site's performance to ensure that your content is performing well.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) uses content and technical strategies to improve and maintain the visibility, engagement and performance of your website. Ultimately, SEO makes it easier for people to find your site when they search the web.

Why You Should Care

By using well-optimized, keyword-rich content, you can:

Sustain long-term traffic without continuous ad spend. Organic search is one of the primary sources of website traffic, often outperforming paid campaigns over time.
Increase visibility and meet users' expectations—lowering bounce rates—by effectively leveraging keywords. Using keywords strategically helps align your site with users' search intent.
Improve user experience with a fast, mobile-friendly and easy to navigate website.

How to Use SEO

Conduct keyword research — The foundation of SEO lies in identifying the right keywords — the terms your audience is searching for.
- Use tools — Semrush, Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs are good resources for researching keywords.
- Analyze search intent — Determine if your audience is looking for information, products or services.
- Identify long-tail keywords — These are longer, specific phrases that are less competitive, but they attract highly targeted traffic (e.g., "top universities for AI degrees" or "AI degrees").
Optimize page titles and meta descriptions — Page titles and meta descriptions are the first impression search engines and users get of your content: Include keywords early in page titles, make sure that your meta description summarizes the page's content and include keywords in your meta description.
Use keywords strategically in content — Include your primary keyword within the first 100 words of your content. Avoid keyword stuffing in body text, and use related terms and synonyms to improve semantic SEO that may match different searches.
Structure your content — use headings and subheadings to structure your content, including keywords to signal its relevance to search engines.
Create high-quality, valuable content — Your content should thoroughly address user questions. Link to related content on your site to guide readers and keep them engaged. Break up text with short paragraphs, bullet points and visuals.
Optimize images and media — Visual content affects SEO. Use descriptive file names, include alt text for all images and compress files to improve site loading speed.
Optimize URLs — When naming your pages, consider how it will appear in the URL. Use short, descriptive URLs that include the main keyword.
Monitor and adjust — Regularly review your site's performance to see what works. Use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track organic traffic, keyword rankings, click-through rate and bounce rates. Update old content to reflect current trends and search intent.

Topic 3: User Experience

Key Takeaways

Learn more about your users so that you can consider their experience and keep them involved throughout site creation for higher quality content, structure and design.
Ensure that your content is well-structured and use plain language and clear labels so that your site visitors can quickly understand how to use your site.
Leave a good impression for your users by being consistent, minimizing site loading times, considering responsive design and making your site accessible.

What is User Experience?

User experience (UX) is a broad term that encompasses the emotions, perceptions and interactions that a person has when they engage with a product or service. For websites, it includes the ease of navigation, visual appeal, accessibility and ability for people to easily and intuitively accomplish their goals.

Why You Should Care

A good user experience leads to a positive impression: people can navigate content more easily, find information quickly and feel more confident about the site's credibility. A poor user experience can cause people to become frustrated, leave your website and decide not to pursue your services. Additionally, search engines now consider UX as a ranking factor, meaning that a well-designed user experience can also improve your SEO.

How to Improve User Experience

Keep users involved — Seek feedback throughout the process, so that you can fine-tune your designs, writing and information architecture as you go.
Learn more about your users — The more you know about their goals, values, preferences, needs and pain points, the better the experience that you can provide.
Consider user journeys — your website is one piece of a users’ broader experience with your services; think about all of their touchpoints and how you might help support your users on the web. To start, identify their main goals and consider the steps they may take to accomplish it. For example, a user may gather information on one page, complete a form on another, and finall call a phone number to meet their goal.
Clearly label links — By using links, your visitors understand how your site is structured, what content is available and what actions they can take. Labels should be clear, succinct and descriptive. Avoid terms like "click here" and "view link" because they don't provide information about where the link will take you, which can be especially confusing for those using adaptive technology to navigate.
Use plain language — Avoid jargon, undefined acronyms, metaphors and complicated syntax so that everyone can understand your content.
Simplify site navigation — Your information architecture, or your site's structure, is how your audience understands and navigates your website. Keep it simple so that people immediately know how to use your site.
Structure your content — Use headings appropriately in numerical order (h1, h2, h3), and don't skip levels. Bullet points and whitespace support people who are scanning for information.
Use consistent design elements — Keep consistent interactions, design elements, colors, and look and feel throughout your website to build familiarity and trust.
Make your site accessible — Designing an accessible site can improve the quality of your site for all users.
Design with mobile in mind — Ensure that your website works well on all devices, especially mobile, as mobile traffic often exceeds desktop.
Keep it fast — Compress large images and limit embedded content so that your site loads quickly — slow sites can increase the likelihood that people will leave.

Topic 4: Tools

Key Takeaways

Tools make it possible to monitor and maintain a site's performance, functionality and quality.
Use tools to write better content, improve user experience and find a better way to present your content.
һ�� offers certain tools for free for sites within our university content management system.

Tools for Web Managers

Tools are powerful in helping web managers to create high-quality, performant, functional sites. Our web manager tools make it possible for you to monitor multiple or large sites with relative ease.

Take the guesswork out of your site's performance. Use our tools to write better content, improve user experience and find a better way of presenting your content.

Essential Toolkit

— Review and download һ�� brand elements, including typography, colors, tartan, wordmark, Scotty and branded templates.
*Offered for all һ�� students, faculty and staff.
— Find photos and visuals available for download. Always use һ�� images, never stock photos.
*Offered for all websites within the university's content management system.
— Helps you to understand how site visitors are interacting with your pages, providing both real-time and historical data. You can monitor a broad range of user activity data and generate custom reports depending on your goals and needs.
*Offered for all websites within the university's content management system.
— An online learning platform with courses led by industry experts. They offer personalized learning paths and recommendations that help you reach professional goals. Certifications are offered upon course completion.
*Offered for all һ�� students, faculty and staff.
— Provides baseline data on your site's performance including quality, accessibility and SEO, and provides actionable insights that can boost your scores.
*Offered for all websites within the university's content management system.
— desktop application that crawls websites and analyzes for technical and SEO issues
* You can visit Site Crawl Request to lern more and request a scan of a specific site/folder under the cmu.edu domain.
— The Associated Press (AP) Style is һ��'s standard for grammar and punctuation. It should be used as a guide for acronyms and abbreviations, business guidelines, capitalizations, dates and times, government terms, numbers, places, plurals, possessives, punctuation and sports guidelines.
— An online design platform that gives you the tools to create professional visual content that aligns with the һ�� brand.
*An enterprise version of Canva with a library of һ��-approved branded visuals will be available to campus partners soon.
— Some partners across campus use LiveWhale to manage their events. This calendar tool integrates seamlessly with your site, and you can easily update events from their platform.
QR Generators — Create QR codes by supplying a website URL, contact details or text, which then generates a scannable image that can be accessed by a smartphone to retrieve the information quickly. QR codes are best reserved for printed collateral or presentations. Free QR code generators are available online.
— Learn which keywords to use when you write by researching which keywords are performing well on your site, as well as which are performing well across the web. You can compare websites to each other to see which keywords are missing or performing well comparatively.
— A nonprofit organization that offers resources and tools to help make your content more accessible for all audiences. Their Web Accessibility Evaluation (WAVE) and Contrast Checker tools are helpful in checking the accessibility of your content and colors, respectively.

Topic 5: Accessibility

Key Takeaways

Always maintain WCAG Level AA compliance: All public-facing websites and web-based applications used for current һ�� programs and activities must conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA Success Criteria in alignment with һ��’s Digital Accessibility Policy.
Prioritize intuitive site navigation, ensure links are contextually relevant and provide alt text for images.
Testing recommendations, guidance and best practices can be found on the Digital Accessibility Office website.

What is Accessibility?

Accessibility is the extent to which a product, device, service or environment can be used by people with disabilities or other specific needs. Digital accessibility ensures that everyone—regardless of ability—can access electronic resources such as websites, software, mobile devices, and e-readers. Carnegie Mellon is committed to creating an environment where all members of the university community can fully participate by making programs and facilities accessible to all, including individuals with disabilities.

Why You Should Care

Following digital accessibility best practices helps to ensure that everyone, including people with disabilities, has equal access to content across electronic resources such as webpages, software, documents and videos. Improving accessibility improves the user experience for everyone.

How to Improve Accessibility

Streamline navigation — Ensure that your site's structure is intuitive and consistent across all pages. Consider using jump links in sidebars to help users quickly find what they're looking for on your web pages.
Use heading tags — These establish site hierarchy, allow readers to efficiently scan your content and help screen readers and search engines understand your content.
Link relevant text — When adding a link, don't use generic words like "click here." Instead, provide context with a call to action like "Visit ."
Double check files and forms — When adding a PDF or Word Document to your site, ensure they're accessible by structuring the content with headings and add alt text to images. For forms, group related fields and label fields and buttons.
Consider your layout — Avoid text that is center-aligned, unstructured and too long. Instead, leverage whitespace, lists, headings and shorter paragraphs to make your content easier to read.
Be mindful of color — Provide sufficient color contrast for readability when choosing a background color. Avoid relying solely on color to convey meaning.
Add alt text — People with visual disabilities may not be able to see your images, so this descriptive text helps them understand all of the content on the page by allowing screen readers to describe images. Alt text has additional advantages like helping search engines understand your content and providing a description if the image fails to load.
Caption any videos — Use descriptive titles and captions for your videos. Closed captioning is required for all videos with audio content.
Use resources — һ�� offers accessibility resources, including the Digital Accessibility Office, LinkedIn Accessibility Training and Digital Accessibility Policy. The provides examples and practical solutions to making your site Level AA compliant (note that Level AA compliance includes Level A compliance). You can also test your website with .

Topic 6: Images, Media & Embeds

Key Takeaways

Optimize images and media to enhance the design and appeal of a web page, while improving page load speed, accessibility and SEO performance.
Use proper file formats, compression and, in the case of images, alt text to enhance usability and performance.
Video embeds should be used strategically to allow users to view content without leaving the website.

What are Images, Media & Embeds?

Images, media and embeds refer to the visual and interactive elements added to a website, including photos, videos, audio files and embedded content. Embedded content come from external sources like YouTube videos, social media posts, interactive maps and calendars. These elements make content more engaging, visually appealing and user-friendly.

Why You Should Care

Properly managing images, media and embeds ensures that your website remains fast, accessible and optimized for search engines. Large, uncompressed media files can slow down site speed, negatively impacting user experience and SEO, while embeds from third-party sources can introduce tracking scripts, security risks or slow loading times if not handled correctly.

How to Use Images, Media & Embeds

Optimize all images — Compress, size and maintain proper aspect ratio for all images.
Be mindful of the format — Acceptable image formats include webp, jpg, png and svg. WebP files are best when image quality and performance are a concern, but WebP is a newer file format and is not yet supported by all browsers. JPGs are widely supported and are best for photos and rasterized images, but sacrifice performance for quality and do not support transparency. PNGs are widely supported, support transparency and best for vector art, but may sacrifice quality for performance.
Use structured file names — When adding media to the CMS, use hyphens (-) instead of spaces for file names (e.g., kitten-in-spring-daffodils.jpg instead of IMG12345.jpg).
Know where to look — Images can be obtained from internal sources, like the . If using images from external sources, ensure that you have permission to use all images.
Use embeds — Video embeds from platforms like YouTube or Vimeo typically provide optimal performance, ensuring responsive sizing with CSS. Make sure to disable autoplay to enhance user experience and accessibility.
Double check non-video embeds — Embeds like LiveWhale calendars or interactive maps may require special handling. Check all embedded code before adding a web page to ensure that it is properly displaying. Be careful about the use of iFrames, because they can cause slow loading and other issues.

Topic 7: Web Maintenance

Key Takeaways

Keep your website up-to-date: refresh content, fix broken links and cleanup old files. Doing so will improve site speed, SEO performance and user experience.
Plan and organize content updates with a content calendar. Set a review schedule with reminders to ensure that your content is accurate and up-to-date, particularly for dates or events.
Identify and remove unused or redundant content to prevent outdated material from appearing on your site and negatively affecting SEO.

What is Web Maintenance?

Website maintenance is the ongoing process of monitoring and updating your site's content, including images, copy and links. It also includes backend maintenance like deleting old files and images that could be negatively affecting your website's performance and site speed.

Why You Should Care

Practicing good website maintenance and hygiene ensures that your web content is up to date; it also allows you to monitor broken links, inaccurate or outdated information and other content that could affect user experience. Proper website maintenance can optimize site speed, performance, SEO and more.

How to Maintain Your Site

Create a content calendar — Ensure a consistent flow of content by developing a content calendar that outlines what content will be created and when it will be published.
Establish a review schedule — Once your calendar is created, consider how often your content will need to be updated. For example, does your site need to be updated weekly, monthly or yearly with important dates or events? Mark down important dates, set reminders to update key information and audit your content to make sure it's accurate.
Monitor broken links — When you're reviewing your website's content, check to ensure all of your links are up-to-date and working. A quick way to check for broken links on a regular basis is to use SiteImprove. If you need to point an old URL to a new one, .
Practice good site hygiene — As you're establishing your review schedule, make sure that you save time for site clean up: Delete old images and PDFs that are no longer being used. Doing so can greatly improve your site speed and performance.

Topic 8: Information Architecture

Key Takeaways

Design a logical hierarchy for your site with clear categories and consistent navigation. This helps your audience easily navigate your site and find relevant content, and it can boost SEO by making your website more accessible to search engines.
Use descriptive, user-friendly labels, and keep it simple.
Build a flexible architecture that can grow over time, and test to ensure it meets your users' needs. Always be sure to check that your IA is accessible to all users, following accessibility standards.

What is Information Architecture?

Information architecture (IA) is the practice of organizing, structuring and labeling content in a way that makes it easy to navigate and understand. It involves designing the hierarchy, navigation and categorization of information to ensure users can efficiently find what they need. IA is a fundamental aspect of user experience (UX) design, influencing how content is presented and accessed.

Why You Should Care

Information architecture is crucial for a website because it directly affects user experience, navigation and overall effectiveness in delivering content. A well-structured IA ensures that visitors can quickly and easily find the information they need, reducing frustration and increasing engagement. It also improves SEO by making content more accessible to search engines, boosting visibility and rankings.

How to Approach Information Architecture

Understand your audience — Research your users' needs, behaviors and expectations to design an intuitive site structure.
Define clear goals — Align the website's architecture with your goals, objectives and main calls to action.
Prioritize simplicity — Avoid unecessary complexity by keeping the navigation and content organization straightforward.
Create a logical hierarchy — Use a clear structure with well-defined categories and subcategories.
Ensure consistent navigation — Maintain uniform menus, labels and pathways across all pages.
Use descriptive labels — Choose clear, user-friendly names for menus, sidebar links and content blocks.
Add revelant links — Link revelant text to lead readers to important pages and sections. If you're linking to an external site, adjust the link setting so that the page opens in a new window.
Optimize for searchability — Implement SEO best practices, including metadata, keywords and a search-friendly structure.
Design for scalability — Plan for future growth by creating a flexible and expandable architecture.
Test and refine — Conduct usability testing and gather feedback to continuously improve IA.
Support accessibility — Ensure the structure is inclusive and meets accessibility standards for all users.

Creating a New Page?

If you're creating a new page for your site that may be a commonly covered topic across other һ�� sites (information about campus visits, tips on navigating Pittsburgh, etc.), please do a quick Google search on the topic with the keyword "һ��." Check if we have covered this information anywhere already, and then consider linking to this information instead of creating a new page.

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