The Hierarchy of Needs for Higher Ed Websites

University websites must balance many competing priorities. The web presence needs to encourage undergrad enrollment, direct current students to needed resources, inform people visiting the physical campus, and much more. A small web team can feel like they are torn in different directions when they know they need to increase conversions while often struggling just to keep on-premise hardware up and running.

Organizing competing priorities gets easier when viewing them as building on one another. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a helpful metaphor for seeing how a university can leverage a stable foundation to achieve goals now and in the future.

This session emphasizes ways higher ed web teams can rely on automation and standardization at one level of the hierarchy in order to move their focus to a higher level.