About this site

Purpose of the institutional home page

The official site or “institutional home page” for the University of Wisconsin–Madison is designed to reflect the university’s core missions of teaching, research and public service, and to guide both external and internal communities through the university’s official information and vast resources.

Home page goals

• Reflect the spirit and personality of one of the world’s great public research universities
• Highlight content that advances the university’s strategic priorities
• Enable users to quickly find information relevant to their needs

Home page editorial guidelines

UW–Madison’s home page is one of the university’s most visible editorial products. Each month, several hundred thousand unique visitors come to the site, representing the university’s key audiences of prospective students and their parents, current students, faculty and staff, alumni and donors, campus visitors, and Wisconsin citizens, businesses and communities.

University Communications makes all decisions related to the home page, including the most prominent feature content, campus news headlines, featured events and featured sites.

We welcome suggestions from the university community, but ask that you keep in mind the factors that we carefully consider when selecting content for the home page:

Feature content

• Feature items should interest the broad range of the audiences that visit the home page.
• Topics should reflect the university’s strategic priorities in teaching, research and public service, or celebrate the people, achievements or events that reflect UW–Madison’s unique spirit and personality.
• Any feature item must offer a compelling, high-quality photograph or illustration that can accompany the text. The visual must accommodate headline text that is placed over it. Submitted visuals must not break any copyright laws, and photos must not be altered in any way.

Campus headlines

The headlines that appear under “News” are selected from the complete collection of news stories that University Communications staff or other campus communicators release or publish daily. Please contact University Communications if you have a story idea you would like to suggest for one of our editorial products, including the university home page.

Featured events

University Communications selects events for the home page from the online university events calendar. Such events must be open to the public, of interest to a general audience, and reflect the diverse array of intellectual and social activities on our campus.

Featured sites

Sites highlighted on the right column of the home page represent important campus topics and initiatives that typically interest the campus community for an extended time. These sites must provide information directly connected to the university, include timely and accurate information, and be maintained by a university unit or department, or by an organization affiliated with UW–Madison.

Social media content

With this most recent design of the site, we have introduced a social media spot on the page where we will highlight content created by members of our university community. In particular, we will feature select content from Twitter, YouTube, iTunes U, and Flickr. If you have content on these sites that you would like us to consider, please send an e-mail to

You can also help us find your social media content by:

• adding the hashtag #uwmadison to your tweets
• sharing your photos on our UW–Madison Flickr group
• adding the tag uw-madison to your YouTube videos

See also: Social Media Statement