Secondary Page Header and Photo Examples

University of Denver

Footer Examples

University of Denver

Main Photo & Header Examples

Below are examples of header and primary photo examples that are similar to what the PC Web team has expressed as a direction for PC .  Links and notes reflect eduStyle reviews of the websites or EDU Check up.

About eduStyle

eduStyle is a web design gallery dedicated to higher education websites and powered by higher education web design professionals. Users submit, review, and comment on sites they like (or don't like). The aim is for higher ed web professionals to learn from and be inspired by the work of their peers. Once a month two sites are selected as Noteworthy based on user votes and feedback.
eduStyle celebrated its two-year anniversary on January 24, 2009. In the two year and a half over 3,000 higher-ed websites have been submitted to the gallery, and more than 10,000 visitors come to eduStyle each month.

Duke University (design score 97)
http://www.duke.edu/

Royal Roads University (Drupal) (C+)
http://www.royalroads.ca/
http://www.viddler.com/explore/educheckup/videos/156/
They used Drupal and he talks about some of the things they did wrong and could have cleaned up.

Claremont McKenna
Picture choice here was because of the celebration- which I think we should do for the 90th!
http://www.viddler.com/explore/educheckup/videos/135/
Comments on the length of drop downs (academics was too long)
Tips on the news (read more)
Cool News and Info Tabs

Freed-Hardeman (97 on visuals, 89 on information, 96 code A+)
http://www.fhu.edu/
http://www.viddler.com/explore/educheckup/videos/157/
Academics Page Nice http://www.fhu.edu/academics/index.aspx
Clean, good bottom, majors/minors good with buttons on the side; Consistent with nav menu on the side of the picture; should be more call to action buttons
iphone redirection (java script in home page)

Eastern University (A)
(rated highly)
http://www.eastern.edu/springboards/prospective_students.html
http://www.viddler.com/explore/educheckup/videos/147/

University of Denver (A)
http://www.du.edu/index.html
Good footer, great pictures





Deeside College (A) (This is not included for main picture but nav is good)

http://www.deeside.ac.uk/index.php
http://www.viddler.com/explore/educheckup/videos/153/
course description has send to a friend
front page has twitter updates
good use of color blending with photos
lots of next step and calls to action throughout
amazing job of applying online
text to get more information from the college - never seen this one- wonder what the process is?
tutor spotlights
drop down examples look like what we want.

Franklin University
Very Clean, Good Call to Action
http://www.franklin.edu/

 ddd

Media (news, events, etc)

Royal Roads
Media Page or News Release Page Footer (continued other events on the bottom of the release)
http://www.american.edu/americantoday/campus-news/20100119haiti-earthquake-finance.cfmldl

Claremont
http://www.claremontmckenna.edu/

Franklin
http://www.franklin.edu/
Good use of areas below main picture which could be used for prospective and current students

Indian Hills
Good use of video and podcast

Pitzer
Nice use of color and textured background

 Could be used in the media area

zz

Top Sites Reviewed and Other Examples

Cornell University: http://www.cornell.edu/ 
Pro: Easy to read and navigate, collegial, clean
Con: Stuffy/Formal, Not student friendly, not enrollment oriented

Pima College: http://www.pima.edu/
Pro: well laid out, easy to navigate, provided great information, nice design
Con: narrow fixed width layout design, could be more dynamic, not too exciting

Northland College: http://northland.edu/ 
 Pro:  faculty profiles, good use of images and student testimonials, fonts, events calendar, pleasant layout, lots of white space, fresh design, color scheme, navigation, drop down bars on top navigation.

Con: lack of good integrated course information; library site is completely different.




Portland Community College: http://www.pcc.edu/
Pro: Program Information, consistent site, student centered, 5 main topics - use of photos
Con: Color scheme is boring, no visual appeal

Washtenaw Community College
http://www.wccnet.edu/

Pro:  Very creative, unique, very appropriate blend of color, design, and graphics, calendar page, course listing, navigation and layout
Con: busy, distracting, events pushed to the bottom of page

Biola University http://www.biola.edu/undergrad/ (peoples choice)
Pro: Nice campus map. Colors and graphics. Verbiage is good and student friendly. Graphics are hip and eye catching. Exciting and vibrant. A lot of information in a student friendly format.
Con:  Main navigation links are not as easy to see as they conflict with all of the information on the front page.

Randolph College
http://www.randolphcollege.edu/x5.xml

Pro: nice clean look, consistent, uncluttered design, good contrast, dominant student images, good search feature, rss feeds, video with photo layout on main page, heavy use of flash (pro/con)
Con: bottom half of main page doesn't balance the top (heavy graphics on top), some navigation (tiny text on top), courses/programs hard to find

Gateway Community College - Program page
http://www.gatewaycc.edu/Programs/
Pro:  Program page:  nice use of photos, navigation is clear, student centered information, thumbnails good use of faculty marketing/blog/etc.





Boston University http://www.bu.edu/
Drop Down Menu Example
Virginia Commenwealth University (new) (DROP DOWN MENU EXAMPLE)
http://www.preview.vcu.edu/index.php

http://web.trinity.edu/x845.xml  (nice news and events page) ea, nice slideshow with images
Washington State University has a nice photo/video on home page

Solution48/Bigfish

Notes from Solution48/Bigfish meeting 12.11.09
Joe Pizzimenti (owner), Brian Kevitt, and James Palazzolo (Drupal expert)
Phil Munroe, Eileen Archibald, Kurt Chambers, Scott Morken

480-355-2550
7898 E. Acoma Drive, Suite 207
Scottsdale, AZ  85260

Discovery:
They had good questions regarding the past work we have done in usability studies, analytics, etc.

Creativity:
Looking at the web work they did for Scottsdale Healthcare, Sage Software, Humana (micro site), and some other big players, they have a skilled creative team and good design concepts.  Their experience extends outside of websites, and encompasses print design, sales & marketing, and "the bigger picture". This could prove useful in other respects.

Programming/Development:
Their skill in coding can be difficult to determine based solely on viewing a website, but some information can and should be garnished by viewing work they have done. Need to review their experience in PHP and Drupal. It seems they are a full-service shop.  Should review web practices to for implementation of progressive techniques such as image replacement and use of CSS.

They have proven the ability or proof of concept of their ability to integrate PeopleSoft with a local website.

Social Media site they developed for ASU and other universities. BETA Digidorm.com

General:
They seem like a cross-trained, diverse group, because they do consulting, creative work, programming and implementation.

Programming skills in PHP and .NET platforms. The CMS's they recommended for Mesa/Scottsdale were Sitefinity and Drupal, which are .NET and PHP, respectively.  Their recommendation also reflects their desire to develop on a platform that is progressive, SEO friendly, and somewhat easy to develop on.

James has experience with Drupal, including his experience with ASU, which uses Drupal extensively. James' title is Public/Media Relations, Social Media.  For example, how many websites have they built in Drupal. How long have they been working with Drupal. How many other PHP systems have they worked with?

They will send examples of the educational sites they have completed.

Portland State University's experience with Swipht and Drupal

Overview

Portland State University (PSU) has the largest overall enrollment of any university in Oregon. PSU's aging Content Management System (CMS) was based on Binary Cloud, and was unsuitable to adapt to growth. So they sought out a new system that would serve the university's needs. One the developers at PSU was familiar with the capabilities of Drupal, and eventually through an RFP/RFQ process, Swipht Technologies was chosen to help PSU migrate 60+ department sites into a single codebase of Drupal.

According to Swipht, it was the largest scale Drupal integration at that time. According to Swipht, "the new system had to support central sign-on, a sophisticated security policy, and provide a means to share content between different departments and organization websites."

The solution included contributed modules and custom module development to adress the needs. It was basically done in several stages. The first stage was the design and development of a flexible department site which included a deployment process that rapidly deployed sites (installation profile). The second included a central syndication server to provide shared content and media to department sites on demand. The third effort involved the actual migration of content and structure from the old CMS into the new multi-site Drupal framework.

They do not use reverse proxy or other configurations. PSU's servers run on load balanced servers using standard Drupal caching. Their multi-site installation runs under a single Drupal code base, so upgrades only need to be done once at the root level.

PSU's Overview of the Process

Kristin Boden-MacKay, the Director of Web Communications at Portland State University had some good insight into their process.

In short, the whole process took about a year a half. Kristin came in about halfway through the process, after they had already chosen the vendor. As of December 2009, They have 122 distinct sites on their Drupal codebase, and plan to continue migration of more sites. They have about 640 sites in total, so it will be a long, continuous process. She classifies their system as an enterprise solution.

Their old setup was on a BinaryCloud development platform. They are very happy with the new Drupal platform which they've had for over 2 years now, and they have had no problems with it. University Communications provides the templates to the departments, and gives them access to their "sites", from which they can create their web pages and menus.

Kristin related that there's not an easy way to create content in multiple environments—that Drupal is not built to that capacity. I believe that was the reason for the media/syndication server, to share content and certain database tables as needed, while maintaining administrative separation using the multi-site approach.

[Here are some links to multi-site configurations: Drupal multisite, managing multisite, scalability]

Unified Vision

Their identity process is led at the president's level, and they have a unified vision to continue integrating Drupal campus-wide. The department sites do not permit administration of modules or allow PHP scripting in their pages. They work from the basic install profile that is deployed for their site. This gives departments the flexibility they need, but keeps things simple for them and easy to administer content.

Swipht Technologies

They did run over budget and Swipht took a little longer than they planned to complete the whole process, but it was a large work. The project management was not quite as clean as she would have liked to have seen, but in the end it worked out well.

Swipht did not do any of the design work. It was done in house by PSU. Swipht converted the designs into code (HTML and PHP = aka: Drupal theme). And of course Swipht did the consulting, drupal programming and integration of the multiple sites, as well as creating the custom tool to install (replicate) "multisites". (Aegir has matured since then. I don't believe PSU is using Aegir.)

Workflow Processes

They don't have much automated "workflow" processes in place for content approval (for example, they don't have a specialized process for people to contribute to the event calendar, etc.). Actually, they're trying to cut back on the number of pages. She said they have over 300,000 pages being served throughout the campus, and are trying to trim that down as they integrate more sites into their Drupal 'network'.

Here are some specifics about Swipht's work with PSU, taken from Swipht's website:

Drupal Department Site Features:

• Centralized OpenID/Ldap authentication (custom work)
• Ldap user account migration (custom work)
• Multi-site Shared User management (custom work)
• Multi-site Site Access Listing (custom work)
• Google Search Appliance Integration
• Per-site media management
• WYSIWYG Editor integration
• Generic Analytics integration (custom work)
• Google Analytics integration
• Search Engine Optimized XML Sitemap
• Content Access Security (custom work)
• Menu Access Security (custom work)
• Syndication client management and display (custom work)
• PSU Drupal theme (used on all sites)
• PSU Home Drupal theme
• Sophisticated Drupal theme settings and media management (custom work)

Drupal Syndication Server Features:

• Centralized OpenID/Ldap authentication (custom work)
• Ldap user account migration (custom work)
• Multi-site Shared User management (custom work)
• Multi-site Site Access Listing (custom work)
• Content Access Security (custom work)
• Menu Access Security (custom work)
• Custom content authoring (news, events, profiles, faqs)
• Multi-category tagging and classification system
• Web-services XML syndication framework (community/custom work)

PSU Contact Information

University Communications:

• Jennifer Williamson, AVP UComm and Public Affairs, 503-725-3711
• Kristin Boden-MacKay, Director of Web Communications, 503-725-8745
• Therese Graner, Web Communications Lead
• Jodi Hewett, Web Communications Lead
• Tracy Weber, Marketing Communications Assistant

General Contacts:

• Phone: 503-725-3711
• Fax: 503-725-4465
• ucomm@pdx.edu