Problem
The Drupal 7 Australian National University College of Law (ANU CoL) website was outdated with years of short-term fixes, making content updates risky and often resulted in issues elsewhere on the website - increasing the likelihood of encountering system errors and user drop-off rates for potential students.
Solution
Design a new Drupal 10 ANU CoL website integrated with seamless workflow to reduce developer input for content updates and the occurrence of system errors.
Duration
10 months
Deliverables
High-fidelity mockups of the homepage, level one Study page and all level two study pages using existing content from the CoL website.
Responsive user interface using the ANU stylesheet, Bootstrap, and custom CSS for website elements and layouts.
Reusable and auto-updating content feeds using Drupal views with additional configuration of relationships and contextual filtering.
User-friendly content architecture (content types, taxonomies, and paragraphs) to support publication workflow and flexible layouts.
Responsibilities
Frontend and backend development
UX and visual design
Strategy and planning
Project management
Approach/process
Website strategy
To tidy up years of development and quick-fix iterations, I redefined the user journey through a website strategy session - identifying pages on paper and sorting them to adhere to user experience best practices.
Content type audit
I conducted a content type audit consisting of a cull list to reduce migration requirements from ANU Information Technology Services (ITS) and generated a list of field types, field names and machine names in preparation of the migration to Drupal 10.
Website mockup design
Based off of the ANU Website Publishing Guide and other ANU Drupal 10 websites, I created high-fidelity mockups of the homepage, Study landing page, and all level 2 landing pages with the intention to create additional templates using similar layouts for other content types.
Frontend and backend development
Content types development
I developed the content types based on the content type audit - creating fields with their corresponding field types and machine-names in preparation for the migration.
Content workflow
To support seamless publication workflow and flexible layouts, I enhanced the user experience through usage of Drupal paragraphs, custom blocks, and views to make uploading content for non-developers easier and support flexible layouts.
Website templating
I developed customised templates for each content type using built-in Drupal layout functionality and custom responsive HTML as per the high-fidelity content types which allowed for ANU Law staff to publish pages without developer input.
Custom reusable feeds
To provide potential ANU law students with the latest and up-to-date content, I created reusable dynamic feeds to bring the website more dimension and make it more engaging. This reduced the need to duplicate content across the website and keep the content publishing clean.
Responsive development
To ensure the website was accessible for all devices, I used Bootstrap 4 and custom CSS to ensure all templates, views, and custom blocks were responsive for maximised user experience and reduction of drop off rates.