Maastricht University corporate website

The UM website needed to be renewed. Students, staff and externs indicated that they could not find the information they were looking for due to the unclear menu layout and the inadequate search engine. The purpose of this project was to provide the visitor with the right information, at the right time, in the correct language and the correct format for the device he/she is browsing with. Ultimately, satisfaction with the UM's digital information will result in sharing this information with others.

In co-operation with two parties, one for an extensive communications strategy and another who developed a new corporate visual ‘language’ for Maastricht University, we started the discovery phase of this project. 

Working together with the design team, the communications team and various stakeholders from the university we embarked on a journey towards a new digital strategy to build upon for the coming years. 

Dozens of editors will be working to keep the website up to date. 8 workshops were held to find out what requirements the new website had to meet. After this initial inventory, we launched the implementation in October 2014. Due to the different nature of digital information that the University has to provide in the website, a connection was required with many systems, such as SAP, Hodex, Tripolis, UMAPI (enterprise service bus), Personal Profile Pages (PPP), Pure and SSO/ADFS. This technical challenge has been solved through the use of different interfaces based on web services. For the search of the various systems: we have used SOLR and Nutch on the website, affiliated websites and newsletters.

As a result, all the Maastricht University information is easily accessible through a logical menu structure and an adequate search engine. This includes extensive information on education (80 programs with 2400 courses), the organization units (faculties and service centers such as the university library) and research (research units, researchers and publications). The new website contains news, events and blogs. The old site with over 55,000 pages has been replaced by a new, more compact and customer-friendly site containing about 4,000 pages. The site is responsive and fluid for desktop, tablet and phone. In addition, editors can customize the pages with sections such as text, video, highlighted, publications, social media, personal profiles and photo carousel.

“What is different after two years of hard work? The site is ‘leaner’ with some four thousand instead of 55 thousand pages. And not unimportantly, it is visitor-driven. ‘Nobody goes to our website just for fun, there is always a reason, and for a prospective student the reason is different than for an alumnus or benefactor,’ says project leader Manon Gorissen.”

Gorissen is also proud of the way education, the members of staff and research have been woven together. If you go to a bachelor’s study programme, you get an overview of all subjects. At a glance, you see who is the block co-ordinator, while another click will reveal all personnel information and publications. ‘Together with the library, we have started the PURE project, which lists researchers’ publications. We have managed to link that to the website.’” Source: Observant Online