higher education

University websites are notoriously complex. Some of our higher ed clients manage literally hundreds of sites that mirror their institutions’ numerous faculties, campuses, services and audiences.

Designing a good user experience with these unique constraints is no easy task, and it seems like a lot of schools have issues with things like prioritizing their website’s content.

Case in point — I recently stumbled across a tweet that made me do a double-take:

Last week I had the opportunity to attend PSEWEB 2020, Canada's annual digital marketing conference for colleges and universities.

While it would have been nice to attend sessions and meet attendees in person (the conference was originally supposed to take place on the McGill campus in Evolving Web's home city of Montreal), it's safe to say that the virtual version of the event was still a success.

For higher education IT departments, it's a familiar scenario.   

Your team is in charge of managing hundreds of websites that support different mission-critical areas of your organization. You are responsible for updating the sites, keeping them all up and running, and optimizing their performance. Additionally, each site has its own small team updating content, creating new features, and working within the Drupal admin system. They are predominantly non-technical users, and reach out to your team whenever they need help.  

Often, you develop a website to be installed and used once, by one organization. But sometimes, for larger organizations, you need to develop a series of websites that are very similar. This case is very common in big institutions with independent departments or branches, such as:

Alex, Tavish and I had a great time in the T Dot over the weekend at DrupalCamp Toronto. The camp was well-attended, there were lots of great presentations and BoFs, and we even came back with some very hardcore Druplicon touques (hats for you non-Canadians).