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Digital Brand Activation and a Re-platform on Drupal

After an institutional re-branding effort that welcomed a new academic year with a new homepage, the College of the Holy Cross carried out a full website redesign with OHO Interactive to create a new site that would serve as the cornerstone of their digital identity.

The measures of success for the Holy Cross website redesign included an increase in engagement with prospective students as well as an increase in awareness and participation around arts at the school. The redesign project included user research, design, content strategy, and Drupal build and development.

Project Results for Holy Cross Website Redesign

  • +515% increase in traffic to the application page
  • +14% increase in organic traffic
  • +50% increase in mobile traffic
  • Y-O-Y increase in website traffic from 10 key geographic regions

Key Business Goals for Holy Cross Website Project

Brand Expression and Activation

Support new branding with content that incorporates copy, tone, visual elements, and overall messaging that is consistent with the brand identity.

Content Strategy

Elevate content for prospective students in order to provide easier pathways to find information and navigate the site, and create clear calls-to-action that help increase engagement.

Governance

Implement taxonomy-based access control and organic groups enabling a permission management system that eliminates the bottleneck of requests for the marketing communications team.

Award Winning Website Design for Holy Cross

The College of the Holy Cross website received Gold in the 2015 Education Digital Marketing Awards and was a 2016 MITX Awards Finalist in the Education category.

Why Drupal was chosen

Drupal Works for Higher Education Publishing

As part of the project OHO Interactive upgraded and connected the entire Holy Cross web ecosystem. The previous structure was scattered and included static HTML pages, WordPress, and Drupal 6. OHO brought together a mix of disconnected systems with multiple Drupal installations into one single Drupal installation with feeds from other systems.

Key Aspects of the Drupal Website for Holy Cross Created by OHO Interactive

  • Flexible landing pages – Develop a customized solution that allows for flexibility in the creation of landing pages rather than a standardized design template with limited landing page options.
  • Content Syndication from WordPress to Drupal – To break down the silo between the News site and the Drupal installation we developed an automatic syndication tool. When a tag is created in WordPress, the same tag is added to taxonomy on the Drupal site. This approach allows us to leverage taxonomy natively in Drupal so that we can customize the views.
  • Governance & Permissions – Implement taxonomy-based access control and organic groups enabling a permission management system granting editorial access to various content contributors and editors across the campus community, thereby eliminating the overwhelming amount of update requests creating a constant bottleneck for the marketing communication team.
  • Development team partnership – We involved the development team through the process to ensure a smooth hand-off and to keep the internal development team up-to-speed.
  • Component based content widgets — Developed and designed a library of user interface components to allow content to be presented in the format best suited for it (e.g. deadline dates, link lists, photographic callouts, statistics).
  • Google Auth integration — Keeps user accounts centralized on the already- established authentication systems, nullifying the need for the school community to maintain two sets of logins.
  • Acquia Hosting & Support – The new site infrastructure is hosted with Acquia who provides technical support and patches. OHO Interactive continues to consult, design, and develop new features.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen
  • Views – allows for extensive content re-use and syndicated publication
  • Organic Groups – manage over 100 editorial groups
  • Blocks – provide flexible content
  • Custom Search – allow for customization and search across domains
  • Over 25+ custom modules to handle content publication