Be thorough in your process

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Be thorough in your process

What does it mean to be thorough in your process?

A thorough process involves planning ahead, following clear steps, and reviewing your work throughout your site's lifecycle.

Instead of defaulting to how things have always been done, step back, consider the best actions to take, and make sure your work meets your audience's needs and established standards.

Why it's important to be thorough in your process

Creating content that meets McGill's Digital Standards takes thoughtful planning, intentional execution, thorough review, and continuous improvement.

Without a defined process, it's easy to miss requirements, skip important steps, or lose sight of your goals.

Benefits of being thorough

Higher quality content
Greater consistency
Less time and effort over the long term
Fewer issues and surprises

How to follow a thorough process

Site maintenance checklist

Consider setting recurring calendar reminders to help you stay on top of these critical site management tasks.

Review regularly

Review annually

Conduct a content audit, including verifying content meets all of McGill's Digital Standards
Review site permissions and access
Evaluate whether larger changes, like a site redesign, are called for:
- Have your audience's needs changed?
- Has your content changed significantly?
- Is your site aligned with current best practices?

Web projects

Here's how to follow a thorough process when planning and executing a new digital project, such as creating or redesigning a site or site section.

Define your audience, goals, project team, resources, and timeline using a project brief.
Make a research plan to inform your decision making when planning your project, and evaluate your choices after launch. This could include:
- Benchmarking
- Reviewing analytics (Google Analytics, heatmaps)
- Conducting (or referencing existing) user research, like surveys, journey maps, interviews, workshops, and testing (if appropriate)
Build data-informed prototypes (e.g. wireframes, staging site) that meet McGill's Digital Standards.
Launch and test!
Put a plan in place to evaluate and revise on an ongoing basis.

If working with external vendors, be sure McGill's guidelines and requirements are communicated and acknowledged to ensure compliance.

Use of generative AI when building and managing sites

Follow McGill's AI generated images guidelines and clearly indicate when images, video, and audio content have been produced by generative AI.
Make sure any text created using AI meets McGill's Digital Standards.
Respect copyrights—using generative AI tools can infringe on a copyright owner's exclusive rights by producing derivatives. View the Copyright at McGill website for further details.