Platform
- Drupal 10
- Pantheon hosting
- Google Analytics with custom tracking
- Cloudflare CDN
Key Features
- A mix of content retention/migration, merging, archival, and creation
- Intelligent content architecture designed to support the new design as well as future evolution
- New library of components that can be used to build/augment pages throughout the site
- Robust theming and responsive design that is thoughtful enough to handle a variety of content and layout changes
- Responsive image styles with support for custom cropping and/or focal point selection
- Images optimized for performance and accessibility
- Solid defaults for meta tags and social sharing, with support for customizations
- Rearchitected site navigation
- Support for bespoke native language content authoring and interface translation for selected languages using Drupal's built-in multilingual capabilities
- Google Translate integration for all other languages (tastefully implemented)
- Media Library with support for various media types (including images, videos, and documents)
- Media Library customization to improve your ability to find and manage media assets
- Caching strategy to improve performance and reduce hosting costs without sacrificing content freshness
- Improved faculty/staff/administration directory
- Site search with faceting, content-type-specific results, search term highlighting, suggestions, etc.
- New ways of presenting academic catalog data. Display course info in an attractive, user-friendly way. Show relationships between courses, prerequisites, programs, faculty, academic calendar, etc.
- Program finder with helpful search and filtering options (e.g. by department, degree type, location, etc.)
- Content, menus, and calls to action designed to empower key personas/user groups (e.g. high school students, MassReconnect students, other prospective students, current students, faculty, staff, first-generation college students, immigrants/asylees, etc.)
Timeline
- September, 2023
- Kickoff meetings. Build rapport, establish roles and responsibilities, learn communication styles/preferences, etc.
- Collaborative discovery process and stakeholder engagement
- Provision team access to Pantheon and review current configuration
- Establish technical strategy for developing and testing new site while maintaining current site. Provision Pantheon multidev sites, initiate an Integrated Composer model, etc.
- Establish project management tools and processes that work well for both teams
- Deep dive into current site
- Draft community engagement plan
- September-November, 2023
- Hold multiple on-site listening sessions
- Conduct additional workshops with representative groups
- Synthesize and crystallize feedback
- Translate feedback into action steps/features
- Work with core stakeholders to triage and prioritize potential actions/features
- October-November, 2023
- Site map, navigation, and content architecture work
- Iterative visual design process in consultation with MassBay design stakeholders
- December, 2023
- Complete iterative visual design process
- Finalize site map, navigation, and content architecture work
- January-March, 2024
- Content/site architecture implementation on new dev site
- Iterative development process
- Selected content migration and transition work
- March-April 2024
- Regularly update dev/test sites with new features and gather feedback from stakeholders
- Continue full-stack development, with focus shifting toward front-end dev/theming
- Directory and academic catalog-related work
- Additional content migration and transition work
- May-June, 2024
- Complete primary full-stack development process
- Additional technical and user acceptance testing
- Team training sessions
- New content creation, updates, revisions, etc.
- Empower content teams and address any issues that arise.
- Triage potential issues according to pre/post-launch priority
- Public beta availability and feedback solicitation
- June-July, 2024
- Pre-launch phases, including integration testing, load testing, etc.
- CDN configuration and launch preparation
- Final site tuning
- Public site launch
- July-September, 2024
- Post-launch support
- Additional training and guidance