Maintaining the Rutgers.edu website

This website is a Drupal website. Content for this site is managed by Amy Reilly in the Office of Creative Services. Rutgers.edu is the web address for Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Rutgers.edu site welcomes about 22,000 visits each day and about 350,000 unique visitors each month (as of November 2011).

As the always on, always accessible public presence of the university on the Internet, the site merits diligent stewardship.

Here’s how we keep the 70-plus page site fresh, accurate, and informative.

Target Audience

We consider the primary audience to be prospective students. Current students, faculty and staff, and the general public are our other main audience. The primary audience would be high school students and transfer college students, and adults who may seek to attend graduate school or take certain classes or training.

Our goal is to highlight all of the wonderful things going on at Rutgers and explain a complex, large, and varied institution to those who have no familiarity with the place while making the site easy to navigate both for those users and people already familiar with the university.

General Note on Language

Tips for writers: Take the Communicator Certificate course “Writing and Design for the Web” and visit the Writing for the Web page on the University Communications and Marketing site.

Language used throughout the site should strive to be simple, clear, and direct. Pitched at an 11th grade reading level. Writers should also be aware that many readers might not use English as their first language.

Each page should be imagined as if a viewer landing at that page had no previous knowledge of the university and had visited no other page on the site before. Each page gives a simple introduction that implicitly states an understanding of the visitor’s needs, tells what is to be found on the page, and has a call to action.

All language should be user-centric. It states what a visitor can do, learn, or benefit from rather than what Rutgers can do. It is very easy to slip into language that moves away from this perspective. Be on guard when drafting text.

Rutgers projects, works, initiatives should be described within the framework of the university’s core missions of education, research, and service to the state.