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A Shared Vision For ewu.edu

The EWU website (ewu.edu) is the university’s number one marketing and communications tool. It connects prospective students, families, alumni, donors, and the community to Eastern—and tells the story of who we are.

Every story, photo, and program page shapes how future students, alumni, and partners see our university. Maintaining a consistent voice and visual identity across all pages helps ensure that EWU’s brand and value propositions are clear and cohesive.

This framework defines the shared roles, responsibilities, and processes that keep our website accurate, consistent, accessible, and aligned with EWU’s brand and enrollment goals. It’s a collaborative effort across campus to communicate Eastern’s story effectively and deliver an engaging, unified web experience.

The EWU digital team seeks to:

  • Recognize our audiences’ needs and expectations.
  • Leverage web technologies to better meet institutional goals.
  • Incorporate a shared brand identity and story.
  • Understand best practices and industry standards, and measure the success of decisions based on data.

Who This Policy Is For

This framework is for all EWU faculty, staff, and administrators who contribute to, edit or request updates to the university’s public-facing website. It provides guidance for maintaining accuracy, accessibility and brand alignment across ewu.edu.

Purpose & Scope

  • Recognize and respond to audience needs.
  • Leverage web technologies to meet institutional goals.
  • Use a shared brand identity and storytelling approach.
  • Apply best practices and measure success through data.
  • Focus on usability, storytelling, and continuous improvement.

  • Departments must designate at least one content lead who is responsible for updating and ensuring the accuracy of their pages, contact cards and application deadlines.
  • Editors must complete training before being granted editing access.
  • The Digital Team reserves the right to revoke access if content does not comply with EWU policies or governance standards.

This governance framework applies to all websites managed under the ewu.edu domain that serve external audiences:

  • Prospective students
  • Current students
  • Parents and families
  • Alumni
  • Donors and philanthropic organizations
  • Community members

The digital team’s goals, supported by this framework, include maximizing usability, enhancing storytelling, and continually improving the digital presence. It aims to achieve a coordinated governance model where content activity is shared among empowered editors, moving away from a dispersed, decentralized approach.

  • Ensure accuracy, consistency, and accessibility across EWU’s public-facing websites.
  • Align content with institutional priorities such as admissions, scholarships, fundraising, and applied learning.
  • Reduce confusion and risk in what was previously a decentralized web environment.
  • Reflect EWU’s core values: quality, access, inclusiveness, integrity and a student-centered learning environment.

Excluded: internal tools and faculty/staff sites such as InsideEWU and SharePoint.

Roles & Responsibilities

  • Oversees site maintenance, governance, and training.
  • Owns design, layout, and user experience standards.
  • Ensures accessibility, compliance, and brand consistency.
  • Manages content freshness, SEO, and removal of outdated pages.
  • Provides analytics, reporting, and campaign support.
  • Builds custom projects (e.g., Give site, Program Explorer).
  • Consults with departments for accuracy.

  • Provide subject matter expertise for programs, faculty bios, deadlines, and accreditation.
  • Review content annually or quarterly.
  • Collaborate with the Digital Team on major updates.

  • Provide technical infrastructure and security.
  • Partner with the Digital Team on compliance and deployments.
  • Do not govern content strategy or voice.
  • Do not make updates on ewu.edu.

  • Maintain authoritative content for admissions, Financial Aid & Scholarships, Running Start, and College in the High School.
  • Partner with the Digital Team on recruitment initiatives.

  • Collaborate on fundraising campaigns and giving tools.
  • Support digital content that advances philanthropic goals.

Content Classification & Ownership

  • Definition: Content of high strategic value that meets critical business needs. This includes core institutional information, official policies, and content directly supporting university-wide strategic goals such as recruitment, fundraising, and accreditation.
  • Characteristics: Access is strictly limited to specific staff (primarily the Digital Team) to ensure content quality and accuracy. It reflects the university’s official voice and must adhere to EWU, state, and federal guidelines.
  • Ownership/Influence: Primarily owned by University Marketing & Communications (Digital Team), with collaboration from institutional partners for accuracy.

  • Definition: Content with strategic marketing value for primary audiences (e.g., prospective students, current students). This generally includes any content within the primary menu structure of the ewu.edu sitemap. Some core content may also be authoritative.
  • Characteristics: Crucial for user engagement and information gathering. It must be accurate, up-to-date, and align with EWU’s brand and storytelling efforts.
  • Ownership/Influence: Institutional partners (e.g., Departments, Enrollment Services) own the subject matter, with Marketing & Communications (Digital Team) having significant influence over its presentation, design, and adherence to standards.

  • Definition: Content primarily for department or tertiary audiences, or that has no direct strategic marketing value. This may include departmental news, very specific event details not targeting broad external audiences, or content that will be short-lived. Note: news stories should be run through an editor before publishing.
  • Characteristics: While managed by departments, it still contributes to the overall digital presence and must avoid perpetuating stereotypes or biases.
  • Ownership/Influence: Primarily owned by Institutional partners (e.g., departments, faculty), with general oversight from the Digital Team for overall site quality and consistency.

To ensure clarity, consistency, and strategic alignment, EWU’s web content is categorized based on its strategic value and audience. This classification helps define ownership, access, and review processes, providing an insurance policy for the investment made in digital platforms.

Content Change Categories

  • Handled directly by the Digital Team to ensure efficiency and immediate compliance, often about authoritative or core content aspects of quality:
    • Removal of outdated content (e.g., past events, expired reports, inactive or broken links).
    • Layout or formatting improvements (e.g., mobile optimization).
    • Corrections to typos, broken links, and accessibility issues.
    • Updates to reflect global messaging campaigns (e.g., scholarship wording).
    • Maintaining consistency with the catalog in our academic offerings yearly, this includes unpublishing degree pages that are no longer valid, and updating navigation and redirects.
    • Polytechnic messaging for SEO purposes.

Initiated by the Digital Team or departments, requiring consultation and joint effort to ensure accuracy and alignment with institutional goals, typically involving Core Content or Authoritative Content, where departmental input is needed:

    • New program launches.
    • Changes to degree or certificate information.
    • Shifts in program mission, tone, or focus.
    • Overhaul of content structure or user navigation.
    • Major content updates where the Digital Team assists in streamlining processes and ensuring effective management and accessibility of critical information.

Initiated and reviewed by departments, reflecting their specific expertise. While departments manage these, primarily concerning Core or Non-Core Content, the Digital Team retains the right to edit for compliance and consistency with university standards:

  • Faculty/staff rosters and contact info.
  • Application deadlines and links
  • Department news, events, and announcements.
  • Program-specific narratives.
  • Communication about a degree added or no longer being offered.

Editorial & Brand Standards

Refer to our student’s first content strategy.

Use short sentences, bulleted lists, 3-5 sentences per paragraph, avoid jargon, and aim for an 8th-grade reading level.

 In the event of disagreement regarding content authority or editing scope:

  1. The Digital Team and department will meet to review concerns.
  2. If unresolved, the issue will be escalated to the Director of Marketing.
  3. Final escalation may involve the appropriate Dean or VP, depending on the content type.

 

All content must rigorously follow EWU’s brand voice, visual identity guidelines, and accessibility best practices. Marketing & Communications oversees grammatical standards for all materials, print and online, produced on behalf of EWU, regardless of the audience, to promote consistency. Policy 201:03 External Communications.

The Digital Team reserves the right to edit for clarity, length, tone, grammar and compliance on all content. This ensures that content is accurate, reflects EWU’s core values, and adheres to a unified style. Departments are encouraged to collaborate rather than publish siloed or duplicative content.

Key content and readability standards include:

Media Gallery

Before uploading any PDF to the Media Library, please run the file through Adobe Acrobat’s Accessibility Checker and address any flagged issues.

Why this matters
PDFs are one of the most common sources of accessibility violations. When a PDF is not accessible, it creates barriers for screen reader users and exposes the university to compliance risk.

Basic accessibility checks
Before uploading, confirm that the PDF:

  • Uses properly tagged headings
  • Includes alt text for images
  • Has a logical reading order
  • Is not a scanned document (e.g., MOUs or image-only PDFs)

Getting set up in Adobe Acrobat Pro
 To work more efficiently, add accessibility tools to your Acrobat toolbar:

  1. Open Adobe Acrobat Pr
  2. Select Tools (to the right of Home in the top toolbar)
  3. Under Scan & OCR or Enhance Scans, select Add
  4. Under Accessibility, select Add
  5. Under Action Wizard, select Add

Training
 Editors are encouraged to self-enroll in accessibility training that covers:

Note: you can skip any non-applicable topics inside the training, for example, if you are a staff member and don’t use Canvas, go to the next module.

If you’re unsure whether a PDF is appropriate—or how to fix one—please reach out before uploading.

PDFs should not replace content that can live as standard web text, including pages, tables, or lists. In particular:

  • PDFs should not be used to bridge academic advising, program requirements, or other student-facing guidance. Consider hosting these files in a department Canvas spot and linking to them. Canvas has a built-in accessibility checker;  WordPress does not. 
  • PDFs should be avoided for content that is frequently updated
  • If information needs to be searchable, readable on mobile, or kept current, it belongs on a web page—not in a PDF

All images added to pages or posts must include meaningful alt text.

Why this matters:
Alt text allows screen reader users to understand the content and purpose of images. Without it, important context is lost.

Best practices:

  • Describe the image’s purpose, not just what it looks like
  • Keep it concise and relevant to the page context
  • Avoid phrases like “image of” or “photo of”

A note on images with text:
Please avoid using JPGs or PNGs that contain embedded text (such as flyers or graphics with key information). Text in images cannot be read reliably by assistive technology, does not scale well on mobile, and creates accessibility barriers. If the information matters, it should be real text on the page.

Learn More

File review and removal

The Digital Team periodically reviews the Media Library to identify outdated, unused, or inaccessible files. As part of this process, files older than three years may be subject to review and removal, particularly if they are no longer relevant, are not linked from active pages, or do not meet accessibility standards.

In many cases—such as legacy PDFs attached to older news stories (older than five years) or archived pages—files may be removed during routine maintenance without contacting the originating department. When a file appears to support active or department-owned content, the Digital Team will reach out to confirm whether the file should be updated, replaced, or removed.