Vanderbilt Digital Strategies

Website Tools, Training and Resources

The Vanderbilt Digital Strategies team sets standards for university web properties, ensuring consistent content, user experience, and brand representation. We empower schools, departments and centers to develop and manage sites effectively by providing accessible resources and brand-compliant templates and components.

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Getting Started

The resources below are designed to quickly train you on how to create and maintain sites within the university's latest theme called FutureVU Digital.

Have an older site that you need to edit? Skip to legacy platforms.

Website Building and Editing

Website Design

  • Design System: When you're ready to start building and editing pages, explore page templates, components, and modules to optimize your site's navigation and user experience.
  • Design System Updates: Discover the latest additions to our design system since its inception in 2021.

Website Content

  • Website Writing Best Practices Guide: Write your content like a pro with guidance on headings, link text, actionable CTAs, SEO and character counts for many popular modules.
  • Website Images: Find photos for your site using the university’s digital asset management repository.
  • Other Graphics: Learn about Creative Commons licenses and discover free resources for editing photos and graphics.
  • Video and YouTube Training: If you want to place a video on your site, learn how to add it to Vanderbilt’s YouTube channel first and then embed it on a page.
  • Analytics Best Practices Guide: Learn which reports to run to get valuable data for making decisions about your site's navigation and content. Contact Digital Strategies for access.

Legacy Platforms

These platforms and themes are used for web properties that have not yet migrated to the new WordPress FutureVU Digital theme. The resources below are intended solely for maintenance purposes.

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OmniUpdate:

AnchorDown:

Roles & Responsibilities

  • Your Responsibilities as a Site Manager

    As a site manager, your responsibilities include: 

    • Defining site goals, audiences and priorities
    • Creating, writing and maintaining site content
    • Selecting images 
    • Building pages and making updates in WordPress or OmniUpdate
    • Collaborating with your team, school, or department for reviews and approvals
  • Digital Strategies' Responsibilities

    When you're ready to create or update a site, Digital Strategies provides the following services:

    • Setup and launch assistance
    • Content and navigation guidance
    • WordPress Training tools for non-developers
    • Comprehensive pre-launch site review 
    • Web and SEO best practices 
    • Technical support through the Help Desk

Need Additional Support?

Request a New Project

Use this form for all new digital strategies projects, including strategic content review, design consultation, large-scale navigation alterations, new websites/webpages, migrations and reviews.

Make a Request

Submit a Help Desk Ticket

Use this form to contact our development team for technical questions related to VU websites or managed applications. Examples include: page or site not loading, access to web forms, image issues, access to Google Analytics.

Submit a Ticket

Resources for Agency Partners

Are you an agency partner? Request online access from Digital Strategies.