ITPF 2025 / Website Center of Expertise Update

Reduced Maintenance Overhead

• Streamlined processes make Illinois WordPress Theme sites easier for non-technical clients to edit, manage, and troubleshoot.

Costs Paid to External Vendors

• College of Applied Health Sciences: $50,000 (for UX consulting)
• College of Law: $50,000
• College of Media: $25,000
• School of Social Work: $110,000

GRAND TOTAL: $235,000

Added Functionality, No Cost

• By leveraging the expertise of our campus web community, we delivered improved functionality for the Illinois Web Theme Toolkit, including the campus directory, section navigation, and program finder.
• Explored and vetted third-party tools for tagging and categorizing news, calendaring, faculty bios, and creating other custom content types.
• Improved functionality and design of WordPress native blocks.

Title II Accessibility, No Cost

• The Illinois Web Theme and Toolkit components meet accessibility requirements per the upcoming Title II deadline. Additionally, we provide guidance on accessible content strategies and best web practices.

Brand Strategy, No Cost

• Following brand guidelines creates a consistent user experience for all University of Illinois website visitors. It also strengthens the Illinois brand’s visibility and power.

Design and Workflow Strategy, No Cost

• Enhanced selection of content design and layout options.
• Built templates, structures, information architecture patterns, and workflows. 

Easy Updates, No Cost

• First access to all new product releases on the Illinois Web Theme. Improved theme and component updates, including accessibility compliance, are provided regularly.
• Technology, security, privacy, and website trends update rapidly. Using campus solutions helps clients stay up-to-date via updates from the Illinois Web Theme.

Responsive Engagement, No Cost

• Responsive internal support teams who care deeply about campus community needs.
• Live working sessions so clients can see edits happen in real-time and suggest future developments.
• Bi-monthly office hours held for anyone on campus.

Before: 

Things the Law Team Liked About Their Original Site 

• Responsive design 

• Good structure 

• Custom content types for specialized content needs (but a lot of them) 

• WordPress platform 

• Their own server with specialty apps running on it 

Things They Wanted to Improve 

• Illinois branding 

• Whittling down the number of custom content types to suit their needs 

• News with images and automatic connection of images to faculty profiles 

Standardization Plus Customization 

Faculty Profile Goals

• Include specialty fields not available from the campus directory or Illinois Experts. 

• Include a self-updating News section populated when new News posts were tagged with faculty members’ names. 

• (Future) Let law professors update their own profiles (core functionality available, needs AD group adjusting to implement). 

News Migration 

• Original site: Both News and Events were sourced in WebTools, but that didn’t allow for the self-updating News items in faculty bios. 

• Kept Events in WebTools for calendar integration. 

• Migrated News to the Law website with structured tags and categories. 

• Added image capabilities and custom view creation. 

Lower Overhead for Alumni Updates 

• The original process involved alumni filling out a web form that emailed Krista Gaedtke, who manually copied the text to the website. 

• The new process lets alumni submit content which will be placed in a draft post and automatically tagged with the proper decade, for Krista to review and approve with a click.

Web CoE 

• Project management and progress targets 

• Performed the initial content import to the development server and applied the Illinois Theme 

• Built templates, structures, information architecture patterns, and workflows 

• Collaborated with Law staff on both standard and custom content types 

• Collaborated on Law site-specific training sessions 

Law Staff  

• Retained specific content control 

• Collaborated with Web CoE on both standard and custom content types 

• Made specific design decisions 

• Made final decisions on what each page should contain and which components to use for their house style  

Additional Benefits 

• The ability to offer feedback at will, see adjustments being made in real-time, and suggest future developments. 

• First access to all new product releases on the Illinois Web theme and tech support whenever needed. 

• Hosting flexibility: Development on cPanel, final hosting on Law’s existing server. 

From the Clients 

“Our previous site was not in terrible shape – it was nicely designed, well-structured, responsive and accessible, but it was decidedly not ‘on brand.’ There were also a few features that we were using on our previous site that didn’t provide the level of customization or flexibility that we needed, so finding viable alternative solutions was also a priority for the migration… The end result is a website that is now fully compliant with Illinois brand guidelines and accessibility standards and takes advantage of many of the design features and components available within the Illinois web theme.” 

— Krista Gaedtke  
Senior Director of Strategic Marketing and Communications 
College of Law The conclusion: 

“There were certainly some growing pains along the way… simply because this was the first time that either of our teams was engaged in this type of project,” said Gaedtke. “We are really pleased with the end result.” 

Background

• Lack of internal web support in the School of Social Work.
• Previously relied on an expensive vended for the WordPress site.
• Extensive customization made maintenance difficult.

Featured

Website Migration

• Exported content using custom scripting from old WordPress.
• Transitioned to a clean and accessible Illinois Theme site.
• Manually reorganized site hierarchy and parent-child relationships of pages.

Reorganize Navigation Menu

• Goals
  • Aligned the global navigation with Illinois branding and the Illinois theme.
  • Combined the Admissions and Academics into one section.
  • Enabled users to locate key information more easily.
• UX method: TreeJack
  • Tree, tasks
  • Optimal workshop
  • WIGG lecture series: Introducing the Technology Services Website Management Consulting Service

Create and Redesign Pages

• Create sample and template pages for the home page and second-level pages.
• Supported clients as they became familiar with WordPress and began building content.
• Redesigned certain pages (e.g., CEU and PATH pages) to improve content structure and user findability.

Quotes

“One of the biggest takeaways from this migration is how complex website transitions can be, even with a great support team. Every website has unique needs, and ensuring all integrations function properly takes time and patience. It was a learning experience for everyone involved! While it was a complex transition, we’re grateful to have the new site launched and are very happy with it.”

–Becky Ponder

Background

• Drupal site built in 2019
• Limited page design and functionality options
• Adding news and events was a clunky process
• Issues with resizing images that rendered properly or behaved responsively
• Insufficient ways to display tagged content
• One-person team for all website updates

Solutions

ICS Calendar Plugin

• WordPress plugin that easily integrates with WebTools calendars
• Event information and listing automatically update as WebTools events update
• Tons of parameters to display customized event information

Content Views Pro for News

Content Views Pro for News is a plugin that displays data from WordPress posts, pages, and custom post types.

It offers numerous filtering options like tags, categories, and authors to create customized feeds such as department directories, alumni news, and department research.

The plugin offers numerous display design options, including pagination and image overlays, and features both an easy-to-use on-page editor and a more robust editor for highly customized feeds.

Section Navigation Component

Section navigation is a vertical, left-side menu to accommodate many categories. It provides a better user experience through:

• Toggles to open/view and collapse/hide many layers of information architecture.
• Specific categories increase findability and decrease interaction cost.
• Offers room for growth.
• Supports more efficient scanning than horizontal navigation.
• Translates easily to mobile.

The final product is a new Illinois-branded, accessible, and secure website hosted on the Tech Services server, with people from the College of Media ready to perform site maintenance.

“The Web CoE team offered a wide range of expertise in web, graphic and user experience design, information architecture, accessibility and more. There were no questions they couldn’t answer! It was incredibly helpful and reassuring to have guidance from the Website Management Center of Expertise team throughout the entire process,” Rushakoff said.

“I had an excellent experience working with the team from the Website Management Center of Expertise! Although it was a lot of extra work, it was primarily a joyful process because we could see the exciting transformation as we worked on the development site and chipped away at our milestones,” Rushakoff said.

Background

• 1 massive and historic college, with 3-5 mini-sites weaved inside 
• Drupal site built in 2019 
• No dedicated web developer on staff to manage updates, enhancements or general maintenance 
• Over 1,200 pages that were pulled over, from news articles to pages with nested information 
• Over 160 Faculty and Staff members to pull into the new directory system; previous directory having no dynamic options, just loooooong static pages
• Coordinating monthly meetings with each department having 5 or more members (around 20 schedules to plan around!) on the committee to make decisions for the department website 

Directory Solution

• Layout options
• Filtering by all, or specifying a department in the backend 
• Custom tags, like accepting research assistants
• Keyword search