Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My! Herding Trinity Tigers' custom websites back onto their EDU domain
Roaming Alone
Faculty, student organizations, research labs: these groups (amongst others) have a voice, and they often desire to express that voice to the world. But what happens when members of these groups spin up their own websites outside of their EDU domain?
Websites get created, published, and shared that reflect the stone-ages. Including Cyberspace takeovers.
Faculty at Trinity use their personal websites for a range of purposes, including: CVs, research updates, blog updates, course content & archives, and miscellaneous content . Very, very, miscellaneous content.
Because these sites are created from raw HTML, faculty find their sites difficult to update. Additionally, the university web team cannot provide support to each unique site. As a result, all types of "interesting" site designs and content emerge onto the web in a blink of an eye, but then become very outdated and stale. Eek!
Along with "Spiders on Drugs" (very, very miscellaneous)
However, some of the sites are designed really well, and have gotten a lot of traffic and great following:
But, they're not hosted on the .edu domain! [facepalm]
This results in frustrated Tigers everywhere, and great content that's...
- Not on the .edu domain, nor searchable on the .edu domain.
- Mostly outdated due to lack to time and knowledge of HTML or CSS.
- Branded by template creators (such as wordpress.com, wix.com, etc).
- Missing valuable content marketing opportunities.
- Lacking the support or troubleshooting from our internal organization.
The Solution: 3 themes, endless possibilities
Customizable, responsive themes on a flexible template designed and built using Drupal on the .edu domain.
Options available to the user include:
- Pre-defined font selections.
- Pre-defined color palettes including backgrounds, panel colors, and accent colors.
- Header, footer, and page layouts.
- Research posts and listings.
- Blog posts, tags, categories, and listings.
- Google analytics for the site owner and the university.
- University brand media assets through the integration of our online repository, WebDam.
User Freebies:
- A secure site using SSL.
- Technical support from the web team.
- Searchable content that lives under the .edu domain.
In order to satisfy a variety of personal tastes, we chose color palettes that could express cool tones and warm tones, along with a selection of accent colors to reflect variety, distinction, and personality.
And for those who just love Trinity, our brand colors were available for use. #TigerPride
In collaboration with ImageX Media, our agency partner, we were able to extend, customize Drupal, and utilize some of ImageX's existing Drupal solutions to bring the designed themes to life.
Behind the scenes.
Using Drupal, our Tigers don't have to roam through back-end web code anymore. With content management training, users can focus their energy on what matters most to them: their expertise!
- Easy-to-lay-out pages with drag-and-drop, using Panelizer
- Well-structured content types and out-of-the-box views using the OpenEDU installation profile
- Automatic creation of microsites from a single content type
- By using Organic Groups, administrators facilitate and add membership to assigned own-group users and contributors
- Custom styles for sites, selectable through a WYSIWYG interface, still maintain global Trinity branding
- Single sign-on using existing Trinity account through LDAP