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By Northern Commerce on
Mohawk College is a public College of Applied Arts and Technology located in Hamilton, Canada.
Mohawk College was seeking an agency to perform a website audit and deliver recommendations on how Drupal could deliver new site architecture, site design, workflow and a content management solution. Full design and Drupal development would follow. The project would include working with Mohawk staff to assist with migration from the current site to the new site, and a need to provide training, support and maintenance for first year implementation.
Execution of the Mohawk project required post secondary education UX and design leadership, with a focus on Drupal. London Canada Drupal firm Northern partnered with London Canada agency ResIM to deliver this solution.
Why Drupal was chosen:
The proprietary CMS that Mohawk was using no longer met the College's requirements. After a comprehensive review of Content Management Systems in the marketplace Mohawk decided that Drupal would best meet the current and future needs as the replacement CMS going forward.
Drupal appealed to Mohawk because it is fully responsive as a default (which was an important consideration due to the younger demographic that comprises its primary user group), it offers impressive scalability and flexibility to meet future content development needs; and the CMS interface is intuitive and accessible for people with varying levels of technical expertise (important as not all of the content creators have deep CMS knowledge).
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
The production of the Mohawk project was segmented into a series of four development sprints. Sprints were focused on delivering a set of core functionality. Each sprint included wireframes, a prototype, prototype usability testing, a micro work breakdown structure, development, quality assurance, and content migration. The wireframes and prototypes serve to fulfill the Front-end Architecture and Design requirement.
Using a lean project management methodology, the project focused on improving hand-offs as opposed to managing individual performance. Project team members were given autonomy within the process with a project manager in place to create work breakdown structures for each sprint.
Communication was handled with monthly, on-site meetings for the entire project team and weekly update calls for the core group. The ResIM and Northern teams communicated on-demand via a shared Slack channel and with frequent meetings.
Project Timeline
- a kick-off meeting;
- stakeholder interviews;
- analytics review;
- secondary research review;
- information architecture design;
- information architecture test, and;
- sprint-by-sprint recommendations.
Mohawk College’s new website has the following features and functionality:
- Cleaner, more modern design
- Responsive HTML/CSS development
- Improved global search
- Accessibility compliance
- News feed
- Staff profiles
- Campus overviews
- Revised program, academic dates, and events pages with filtered search
Mohawk College’s social media activity was integrated into its home page. Effort also went into the program pages. In the end they’re almost microsites, with multiple tabs to help prospective students drill down to the information they need, and provide rich media like image galleries and video.
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 8.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
Administrative Views - custom content views will be created with external filters to allow content to be easily found and maintained by various user roles. This approach enhances the default Drupal content view with popular contributed modules.
Workbench Suite - The popular contributed module set will allow for menu-based or taxonomy-based access schemes with simple moderation and approval workflows.
CKEditor Widgets - the creation of special widgets that inject pre-crafted responsive HTML into the body field to allow for unique customization of the page content type.
Input Formats - users with different skillsets will be given roles that customize the editor experience to their ability. For example, a WYSIWYG editor and image manipulating system is of no value to a user that has low vision.
Organizations involved:
Team members:
Project team:
ResIM
Sectors:
Education
