This document describes the roles and responsibilities of those who maintain campus-level and other mission-critical websites on the WordPress and MyCampus systems provided by University Services (US:IT) Web Technologies (WebTech).
Site Administrators
To ensure a consistent level of support and enable effective content management, each campus or supported University of Maine System (UMS) department designates a primary site administrator for their WordPress and/or myCampus sites. Both site administrator roles can be filled by the same person, or they can be two separate people. The primary site administrator is generally not a staff member within US:IT, but rather is the liaison between IT and campus stakeholders, and the person ultimately responsible for campus content, either directly or by supporting other campus editors. In most cases, the site administrator works in a marketing or communications role on the campus.
Most general user inquiries - reporting content issues, requesting access to a site, asking for editing help, etc. - would be addressed by the site administrators, who would then contact US:IT Web Technologies only in cases where we are needed.
Maintaining Content
The primary site administrator is the central point of contact for all content on their WordPress and/or myCampus site. The person in this role has access to update all site content - including but not limited to text, images, menu, forms and captchas, etc. Even though others on campus may be given permission to edit the site, the campus administrator is ultimately responsible for granting access related to content. Though Web Technologies assists the site administrator with common best practices, such as responsive layout and accessibility, ultimately the content included within these websites are the responsibility of the campuses.
The role of Web Technologies is to provide services that allow campuses to manage web content, ensuring that the services meet best practices, conform to UMS administrative practice letters (APLs) and policies, and meet high quality standards expected of these services. Web Technologies does not directly maintain website content.
Accessibility
In general, Web Technology ensures that the underlying theme, plugins, and layouts meet accessibility guidelines, and the site administrator is responsible for ensuring the content does so. For more details on this topic, please see Website Accessibility.
Marketing and Analytics
Every website should have a defined purpose and a plan to consistently ensure that it is successfully fulfilling its purpose. Activities related to this part of the process - such as marketing campaigns, search engine optimization, and analysis of site visit traffic - are responsibilities on the business end. Sites designed by Web Technologies include technical features to support these efforts, such as inclusion of Google Analytics tracking codes and a WordPress plugin to assist with search engine optimization (SEO), with the expectation that the site administrator will coordinate use of these tools for the campus.
Training and Support
Web Technologies provides appropriate training and support to the primary site administrator, who is in turn responsible for providing support to the other designated content editors at their campus. For most site functions, Web Technologies has also created or is the process of creating documentation that can assist both site administrators and the content editors that they support.
Assigning Roles and Permissions
All requests for permission to edit content should go through the primary site administrator, who acts as a gatekeeper to determine who should and should not have access to add, modify, and delete content. In most cases, the site administrator has access to grant these permissions directly. For example in WordPress, a site administrator can add new users to a specific subsite. In myCampus, the site administrator is responsible for several types of permissions - assigning view and edit permissions on individual pages and portlets, assigning editors the Site Editor role, adding User Groups to site memberships, etc., as explained in the myCampus Site Administrator documentation.
Creating New Subsites
In both myCampus and WordPress, the site administrator can request new subsites, which are sites created by Web Technologies with the same theme and layout as the campus' other existing sites. Once the new subsite is created by Web Technologies, the site administrator or editors are responsible for elements they have access to change, such as layout, page hierarchy, and content.