Digital Footprint Project: Summer Update

Summary

September 10, 2026: Project progress and next steps.

Full Description

The following message was sent to all Cascade editors on September 10, 2026.

Hello Cascaders,

We hope your fall semester is off to a great start!

We wanted to share a brief update on the Digital Footprint Project and the work we've been doing with our partner, Carnegie, over the summer. We've made good progress in several key areas, including:

Stakeholder discovery and survey: Gathered input from stakeholders across the university to better understand needs, priorities and experiences with our current web presence.
Analytics and content audit: Reviewed website analytics and content to help identify opportunities for improvement and inform the future structure of the site.
Content management systems: Evaluated CMS options and gathered information to help guide our platform selection.
Internal communications platform: Established needs and priorities for a future platform to better support internal audiences.
Early wireframes: Reviewed initial wireframes and began exploring how the new website could be structured and organized.

Next steps
As we move into the next phase of the project, our focus will be on:

Selecting a content management system.
Finalizing a news architecture and archive guidelines.
Establishing future web governance policies and processes.

Thank you for your continued partnership and for all you do to help keep W&M's web presence current, useful, and accessible. As a reminder, while we remain in our current system, it's important that we continue to maintain our websites to the higher standards we've established. A tremendous amount of work was done during last fall's content cleanup, and we need to continue that momentum by regularly reviewing and maintaining our content. Your primary site contacts are also working in AWG, our web governance tool, to help ensure that content meets accessibility standards.

We'll continue to keep you informed as the Digital Footprint Project progresses.

Best,
Tina Tanner, University Communications
Shane Baglini, University Marketing