Schedule

Case Study: UIC WordPress Homepage Extends Into a Campus Multisite

Date: Friday, July 15, 2016
Time: 2:00 - 2:45 pm (EDT) (UTC-04:00)
Location: Room B226
Format: General Lecture Session

Session description

In this session, we'll go under the hood to see how UIC redesigned its campus homepage and created a drag-n-drop, component-based content management with WordPress. UIC’s new campus-level multi-site allows more units to build better sites with strong campus branding, a more consistent user experience, responsive design and accessibility, all at significant cost savings. We’ll share the tools and resources we incorporated, what we learned about managing University branding at a diverse and decentralized campus, as well as efficiently facilitating the vendor and stakeholder relationships.

Presenters

Jason Berg

Headshot of Jason Berg
Director, Pixo

Jason Berg is a Director at Pixo who oversees the business development and project management teams. Pixo partnered with UIC in 2015 to redesign and relaunch www.UIC.edu using a novel WordPress setup that provides flexible, re-usable components. Pixo's work is based in PatternLab, an open source tool for creating style guides using atomic design. Those flexible WordPress components and the new campus branding are now providing the foundation for a new WordPress multi-site so that all campus units can leverage the templates, new branding and tools without reinventing the wheel.

Sessions

  • General Lecture Session: Case Study: UIC WordPress Homepage Extends Into a Campus Multisite

Kimberly Charles

Headshot of Kimberly Charles
Director of Digital Communications, University of Illinois at Chicago

Kimberly Charles is Director of Digital Communications for the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has a 16-year track record of bringing shared templates and tools to UIC websites and facilitating learning and information sharing sessions for Web professionals across campus. Kim and her staff are responsible for a campus-wide WordPress multi-site that already supports more than 200 sites. In 2015, she led the roll-out of a new campus branding system across multiple digital platforms, including the relaunch of the campus homepage, www.UIC.edu. The new UIC homepage uses WordPress with a set of re-usable components and templates that are now being made available in a multi-site platform for other campus units. Kim continues to lead the charge at UIC for campus-level tools that help raise the bar for all aspects of UIC's web presence.

Sessions

  • General Lecture Session: Case Study: UIC WordPress Homepage Extends Into a Campus Multisite