Sector(s)
A Complete Redesign
OHO completed a strategy, re-design, and re-platforming of the Oberlin College website and over 25+ supporting websites. The project took over 12 months to complete. The project goals included:
- Attract and prioritize high quality prospective students
- Consolidate multiple CMS systems into a single unified Drupal multi-site
- Leverage the Acquia platform for hosting and support – and plan for personalization
- Capture the highly-individualistic spirit of Oberlin
- Clearly define their two distinct prospective journeys for their conservatory and their college of arts and sciences.
- Enable and promote more data-driven decision-making
About the project
User Research and Customer Journey: Understanding Prospective Students
At the outset of the project, OHO Interactive conducted exhaustive user research, surveying hundreds of prospective and current students, their families, and alumni from Oberlin. We also conducted more than 20 hours of one-on-one interviews to better understand the unique needs of prospective students.
Fixing User Flows and the Information Architecture on Oberlin.edu
The original orbelin.edu site had multiple navigation structures on the majority of its pages, which our research found made it difficult for users to find the content they needed. By simplifying that structure under a hamburger menu, we were able to consolidate the most relevant content in one place and free up valuable page real estate.
New Visual Design for Oberlin College
Implementing a design that featured rich, experiential photography provided prospective students with a clear understanding of what to expect when they arrived on campus. Providing clear and distinct paths for conservatory prospects and college of arts and sciences prospects throughout the site ensured that each group could access the information that was most relevant to them.
Messaging Architecture and Content Strategy
OHO Interactive provided a new messaging architecture with four key brand pillars that described the experience of Oberlin College. We developed a content strategy that involved extensive content reuse of news, events, profiles, and stories throughout the site to illustrate the student experience.
Why Drupal was chosen
Oberlin was looking to consolidate multiple CMS platforms onto a unified system. Drupal provided a flexible solution that allowed for the integration into multiple third-party systems and provided the permissions structure to support a large decentralized content editing team.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
- Organic groups – used to manage the permissions and structure of over 100 different sections and subsites
- Context OG and UI – improve the usability of admin
- Dif – view and compare revision
- LDAP – connect with the internal authentication servers
- Views – intensive use of views to allow for content re-use across the site
- Blocks – manage contextual content
