Olympic College
Drupal Website Case Study
When Olympic College put out an RFP for an overhaul of their website, they knew full well what a daunting task it was going to be. The community college had been managing their content with the same outdated system for 12 years. Keeping the site running day-to-day required two full-time developers. The user interface could be described as gruesome. The Olympic team had spent more than a decade making plans for how to improve their site—now all they needed was a development team to help them do it.
In 2014, Olympic College put out a call for a development firm who could help them meet their goals. Nearly 20 companies submitted a proposal for the work—we were proud to be selected.
Updates to Site Navigation
Since they’d been waiting so many years for the chance to upgrade, the college’s top priority was to create a site that could evolve as their needs changed. To do that, some key factors had to be addressed. Their site’s navigational structure needed to be reevaluated. They needed a content creation interface that could accommodate their team of more than 50 contributors. Plus, the site as a whole needed to live up to stringent American Disability Act (ADA) accessibility requirements.
Improvements for Users and Admin
Another priority was making the site as intuitive as possible for their content team. We built a user interface that was clear and easy-to-interpret, no matter the user’s technical comfort level. We also provided a lot of one-on-one training, to make it easy for the Olympic team to take ownership of the system.
We knew that Drupal could give us the flexibility and functionality the Olympic team was after, as well as making it easier to keep their site up-to-date. With that as our starting point, we began to tackle key improvements they’d identified.
A lot of the project’s heavy lifting was done with the site’s information architecture. Several sections of the site required complex, multi-tiered content types. For example, the Athletics pages were built using a subset of custom-themed content types that are displayed in a nested, interconnected framework.
Updates
A fully responsive website interface.
Navigation configured for accessibility standards.
Ongoing Development
Working closely with the Olympic team, we were able to build their new site and migrate their existing data in four months. We’re confident that their new system will make the next 10 years of managing content much more pleasant than the last.