Sector(s)

Team Members

dslobodyanik, rvtraveller, doublecompile

Project Team

Rachel Verhaaren
Aaron Bickoff
Eric Gottlieb
Will Cooper
Stephanie Stevens
Chris-Anne Correa
James Smith
Colin Crampton
Emily McDonnell
Justin Rokisky

Visit the site

Visit the site

Organizations Involved

The College of Education at the University of Maryland (UMD) prepares students to become educators, counselors, psychologists, administrators, researchers, and educational specialists. A variety of education issues are explored through three of its core departments: Human Development and Quantitative Methodology; Counseling, Higher Education, and Special Education; and Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership.

Leading officials at the College of Education wanted the school’s website to reflect the innovative nature of their students, faculty, and programs. Mindgrub was selected to redesign the website because our approach aligns with the multi-faceted goals the college hoped to accomplish.

About the project

As a premier center for interdisciplinary research, innovative instruction, and service to the local and global communities, the UMD College of Education wanted a website that would showcase their prestigious reputation in a visually compelling and seamless way.

Content is now easily accessible in a layout that provides users with a clean and interactive interface. The new website has a simplified sitemap grounded in an intuitive information architecture.

Mindgrub helped improve search engine optimization, implement a responsive design and cross-platform web strategy, and increase operational efficiency through an easy to use CMS platform.

Why Drupal was chosen

The UMD College of Education requested that the system of choice include the following features, making Drupal the best fit for their initiatives:

  • A robust content publishing platform that allows content authors from different departments to create content and then have it reviewed by college oversight
     
  • Dynamic content types that guide content authors to provide the “right” information as opposed to the previous system of custom-written HTML pages
     
  • A reduction in technical knowledge required to use the system, providing an authoring experience based on the Paragraph module and WYSIWYG functionality
     
  • Replace a legacy ColdFusion-based system with a modern web framework
     

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

These modules were all designed to provide a better experience for content authors without significant technical experience. The Paragraph module, combined with Media, Workbench, and Web Form, opened up the content authoring experience to college staff without having to know or learn how to use complex HTML. Additionally, Paragraph allows for layout variety on created pages, making pages look different from others when needed.