Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
Last Call Media is a full-service creative agency developing solutions for partners online and off through innovative strategy, branding, print, and digital design. Last Call Media enjoys work with purpose– building engaging solutions that assist and support organizations working to improve their communities.
Last Call Media used its agile process management expertise to design a successful project framework. We organized a host of stakeholders from communications, content, design and developer resources into one exciting force for the creation of a beautifully collaborative outcome. The new site improves performance, increases engagement, and reduces technical debt and operating costs.
About the project
Today, the ability of the various administrative and academic departments to use the site is unparalleled in our experience. We took the time to train their content developers, in-house communications staff, designers and developers how to fully leverage the new wpi.edu. As a result, we’re seeing profound stakeholder use of the tools we collectively built because they’re bought in, and recognize the value in the systems our working partnership designed. Such engagement is the dream of every project, and we’re proud it’s being realized at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Why Drupal was chosen
The project had humble beginnings. WPI had a lot of ideas which they’d translated into a giant content model spreadsheet. We meticulously ensured that we understood it all, guiding a wireframe process in which we were able to make significant contribution to the decision making that yielded a highly intuitive structure. We took each step iteratively, building piece-by-piece, soliciting feedback, and then building the next iteration. We facilitated a dialogue between administrators, college communications, their design department, Acquia and their IT department to map the landscape of business requirements, organizational needs, and their desired design aesthetic.
On the technical side, we reviewed their existing RedDot site, and built a ‘scraper’ to scrape select content off of their existing site and import the data into its new structure in Drupal. We open sourced the scraper too. Next we built a flexible layout system of building blocks that enabled them to build pages however they needed. We dubbed them ‘widgets’, WPI called them ‘elements’, but they were central to satisfying their desire for incredibly flexible layouts that allowed them to build unique layouts on any given page.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
On the technical side, we reviewed their existing RedDot site, and built a ‘scraper’ to scrape select content off of their existing site and import the data into its new structure in Drupal. We open sourced the scraper too. Next we built a flexible layout system of building blocks that enabled them to build pages however they needed. We dubbed them ‘widgets’, WPI called them ‘elements’, but they were central to satisfying their desire for incredibly flexible layouts that allowed them to build unique layouts on any given page.
