We encourage academic and administrative offices to follow best practices for their websites. One area we specifically target is the mission statement. It’s valued internally but isn’t helpful to the site visitor. We’d like to think that others care about the principles and strategic thinking that guide our work, but their concern rather is getting the information that they need. It’s best not to include a mission statement since it’s not information sought by site visitors.
If there’s insistence that the mission statement be included, it shouldn’t be a distraction in the main navigation; it should be part of another webpage. (Hardly any Lafayette sites have a separate Mission Statement webpage, and we convinced a site administrator to let us remove hers last week.) Two possibilities include an About page and a staff listing page.