Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
From HiVolda:
Terese Balsnes
Tor Mikalsen
Jørn Persson
Pål Hjelmeseth Myklebust
Torbjørn Frantsen
The University of Volda has one of the most prestigious programs for studies in Journalism in Norway. It’s location by the Norwegian fjords, makes it a popular place to study.
The web project came out of a public tender in Norway, won by Drupal agency Frontkom in 2017.
The initial wireframes and UX was done by Frontkom, while the profile and visual magic was done in collaboration with Kib & Morits. PM, development, consulting, hosting and support was handled by Frontkom. We are very proud of the result!
About the project
HiVolda wanted an ambitious multi channel digital platform. Some key requirements were:
- A user centric design with emphasis on mobile
- Flexible landing pages
- Integration hub for multiple content sources
- Multilanguage
- Web content to info screens
- High performance
- A highly effective authoring experience
Using agile principles, we worked together in sprints we clearly defined goals. For the design phase, we used a design and content methodology called The Core Model.
Some key principles in The Core Model, are:
- Gather data before you design
- Build your content around user top tasks
- Find out where user needs and business goals overlap
- Define core pages ways in and ways forward
This process is just as useful in designing the CMS backend, as for the end user interface.
The project resulted in:
- 60% more traffic on mobile
- 15% lower bounce rate
- 40% speed increase
And most important: More students, and happier content publishers.
Why Drupal was chosen
Norwegian Higher Ed and Gov sector used to been dominated by proprietary systems. In the last few years however, these projects have increasingly embraced open source solutions.
For Higher Educcation, Drupal was an obvious candidate:
Drupal is the industry leader: Big Universities all over the globe has used Drupal successfully for years
Drupal shines when there is huge amount of content, many departments and complex hierarchies
Tried and tested approaches for a great search experience
Flexibility with regards to integrations, workflows and custom backend UIs
The one area where Drupal is furthest ahead of all competition, is translation and localization. No other CMS is as feature complete for multilingual sites as Drupal.
Frontkom has also been involved with big D7 university projects like Norwegian University of Life Sciences and University of Bergen previously. This way we already knew Drupal was a great fit for any Higher Education site.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
We decided to build on the Thunder distro to get some best practises for professional publishing on the Drupal platform for out of the box. As the project evolved, we realized the hard work put into the theme, content types, integrations and views were suitable for a distributions on it’s own.
This resulted in the Drupal University distribution. It boasts a lot of functionality, like
- An extensive, beautiful responsive theme
- Styleguide for Github pages
- Front end powered by Gulp, Sass, linting, etc
- Multilanguage setup
- 10+ Paragraph types
- 5 Content types
- LDAP user integration
- Feide and Dataporten integration
- Solr search
- CRISTIN research database integration
University is a sub distro of Thunder – probably first of its kind.
Watch the presentation from Thunder Days 2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aslrmYuS-dY
