University

The University of Washington’s Career Center needed some help with its Drupal site. The Dawgs rank among the many, many esteemed universities using Drupal*, and their entire web presence needs to reflect the university’s standard for excellence — U Dub is one of the world’s 25 best and most prestigious universities and the world’s best medical school.

As a brief overview of our role in this project, we:

• Coded the theme, based on a design by UW staff, to fit the main site’s new look.
• Rebuilt the site’s dropdown menus to work like the main site’s.
• Upgraded from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6.
• Imported all content (including most recent webform submissions and what have you).
• Adjusted inline page tools capabilities, including the arrangement of them all into a single tidy block.
• Reworked a custom Trumba calendar module to be Drupal 6 compatible.
• General blocks, menus, templates, and modules Drupalery.
• And so on and so forth.

Here you can see the site’s old header, which didn’t match the rest of the university website’s layout, menu functionality, and visuals. Its many orange elements veered from the classic Husky purple and gold — and web-friendly gray — color scheme, leaving the Career Center’s decor looking a little wrong. (The new header can be seen in the image above.) Note that we didn’t design the new header and footer; we implemented it into CSS:

This is the site’s former footer:

And this is how the footer, redesigned by Career Center staff, looks after ENGINE’s assistance:

Bottom line: we’re very proud to now be associated — even if it’s in a very, very small way — with one of the nation’s oldest, most productive, and largest universities. If we may be so bold, we’re already looking forward to getting our next chance to lend our skills to another incredible academic institution.

We leave you with this:

* Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Cornell, and others use Drupal for various subsites, while universities including Rutgers, Duke, Calgary, and Boston University trust Drupal with their main sites.

We need you to pay a visit to KatinaRaeStapleton.com, the new web home of Dr. Katina Rae Stapleton.

She’s a highly accomplished educator who’s taught at Duke, Georgetown, Syracuse, and St. Lawrence and currently works for the Department of Education. We designed and built her a lively WordPress site from scratch, giving her a place to combine her diverse interests and pursuits. Take a look, and follow her on Twitter @krsprof.