Building a scalable and high-performing drupal platform for a community college to conduct a virtual graduation ceremony
The pandemic has taken a huge toll on many industries especially the education sector where the school, colleges, and universities had to suspend classes, close-down campuses, and postpone exams and rely on digital mediums for the continuation of the schedules. Our client wasn’t prepared for it and facing issues with their website that take a lot of time to load and also crashing frequently. They approached us to build a new Drupal-based platform that offers high performance and deliver engaging experience for their students.
Challenges
- The site was having several glitches and errors as it was migrated from WordPress to Drupal 8 in an inconsistent manner by their previous vendor.
- Designs were misaligned.
- Poor architecture design imposed several security threats.
- Content was not optimized for search engines properly.
- High developer dependency even for minuscule content changes.
- Took 7-8 seconds for the site to load.
Our two-fold solution
Our team of Drupal Strategists, Drupal Consultants, and Drupal Architects build a strong Drupal platform addressing the two major pain points of the client.
- Easier content authoring and management
- Improve student and staff engagement
Post the detailed site audit, the site’s architecture was revamped and redesigned with Drupal 8 upgrades and stabilized it for better user experience.
- Site became stable and secure after regular security patch updates.
- Revamped architecture helped administrators to publish content with less developer dependency.
- Site taxonomy was altered and fixed according to user searches.
- Design misalignment issues were rectified and also refined the site’s overall visual appeal.
- Website sidebar was fixed for better navigation
- New banners were implemented to create Covid alerts and new guidelines for students to follow to remain safe and healthy.
- Drupal chat functionality was implemented through which the students could get relevant information regarding their courses, admissions, training programs, and certifications.
Launching a graduation ceremony commencement site in 3 weeks
As the pandemic brought the challenge of conducting a live graduation ceremony, the college approached us to build a separate website that replicates all the aspects of a real-world graduation event. Our team was also given the daunting challenge of building the website in a span of 3 weeks and handle the following attributes:
- President’s commencement address
- Awards – courses, trainings, and certifications
- Videos from faculties and staff members of different departments
- Student testimonials
- Individual messages – faculty and staff
- A yearbook containing the photos and videos of students in that academic year.
Value delivered
- Website performance improved by 135%
- YouTube views and subscription increase by 50% to witness the graduation ceremony.
- Drupal chat functionality increased student engagement by 10%
- Visitor engagement improved by 7%
- Delivered almost real, virtual graduation experience
Contact our geeks to build high performing and better engaging Drupal platforms!
