Problem
The Australian National University (ANU) requires for all college websites to be migrated to Drupal 10 as a result of Drupal 7’s end-of-life set for early 2025.
Solution
Design the new ANU College of Law (ANU CoL) website to attract and engage future students, serving as a central hub for all necessary information to support their decision to enrol at the university.
Duration
10 months
Deliverables
Website redesign mock-ups
Front and backend development
Responsibilities
Website strategy/planning
Website mockups
Front and backend website development
Point of contact for Giraffe
Management of expectations and milestones for Giraffe and ANU College of Law for migration and website launch
Approach/process
Website strategy
To tidy up the years of development and iterations of the ANU CoL website, we redefined the user journey and identified key pages through a website strategy session - arranging page titles on paper and sorting them to design an optimal sitemap.
Content type audit
A content type audit was conducted to prepare the website for migration to Drupal 10. Content types, field types, field names and machine-names were all noted as well as a cull in the amount of content types to reduce the migration requirements for ANU Information Technology Services (ANU ITS).
ANU website research
ANU CoL was one of the first ANU websites to be migrated to Drupal 10 and include the new ANU web publishing theme. It was still beneficial to look through other existing ANU websites and the newly published ANU Web Publishing Guide.
Website mockup design
The ANU Website Publishing Guide and other ANU Drupal 10 websites were used as a guideline for the ANU CoL website. The mockups included the design of the homepage, Study landing page, and all level 2 Study pages.
Due to the large scale of the website, not all pages could be designed. However, the mockups gave the client a general overview of what the website would look like for specific elements and features.
Frontend and backend development
All priority pages identified in the website mockups were developed before commencing with any remaining key pages of the website.
As the website was being migrated from Drupal 7 to 10, it was important that content types and their machine names were set up correctly to ensure that content migrated over seamlessly for ANU ITS.
Schedule reoccurring meetings
With the involvement of Giraffe, ANU CoL, and ANU ITS, clear communication was essential. Regular meetings played a key role in streamlining the project workflow, defining key milestones, and clarifying each party’s responsibilities to ensure effective collaboration and steady project progress.