The University of Washington Bothell is a higher education institution in the University of Washington system, located in Bothell, Washington.
Over the past decade, UW Bothell experienced an explosion of growth in both its program offerings and enrollments. As the university expanded, so too did its website, which swelled to roughly 14,000 pages and subsites.
The approaching expiry of the university’s proprietary Kentico Content Management System (CMS) license presented the ideal opportunity for Northern to create a faster, more streamlined site that’s simple to update and aligned with the school’s overall goals of accessibility, scalability, flexibility, and security.
The combination of a large amount of website content and an inflexible CMS created challenges for the website’s modest IT team and 200 decentralized editors.
Maintaining up-to-date content across the site became increasingly untenable and as a result, the Information Architecture (IA) grew more complicated to maintain. Instead of enabling content management, the CMS became an obstacle, preventing the communication of important information to students and the administration of faculty needs, in addition to slowing the progress of the school’s priorities.
The new CMS needed to be able to support the growth and evolution of the university over time. For UW Bothell, this meant having the flexibility to easily make content updates, respond to unanticipated changes, and ensure their digital best practices were represented across the site.
Northern began with a dedicated discovery initiative, synthesizing a complete set of technical specifications, design elements, and content needs into a succinct project strategy built around the UW Bothell team’s goals.
From the discovery, Northern determined that the new website needed the following:
Once the deliverables were outlined, the Northern team completed an in-depth comparison of two potential content management systems: WordPress and Drupal.
Northern recommended WordPress due to its flexible Gutenberg content blocks, easy-to-use editing modules, and ability to maintain separate sites within the overall website experience, without having to maintain custom code.
WordPress has the capability to create a multi-site network with sub-domains within an overarching site, which was key for the Bothell team to dedicate top-level navigation to the various website sections while limiting the content editors could access.
Once the details were decided, Northern started the process of helping the UW Bothell team map out and automate their site migration.
With approximately 14,000 pages of content to sort through, the Northern team recommended that UW Bothell conduct a full content review to reduce the number of pages being migrated to the new site. Northern offered a simple, spreadsheet-based content review solution to help their internal teams conduct an analysis for Redundant, Obsolete, and Trivial (ROT) information.
Using the tool, Bothell’s subject matter experts were able to evaluate all of their content based on parameters built around their goals; namely, alignment with their primary audience, relevance, and quality. They indicated the pages that were deemed redundant, outdated, or trivial so they would be held back from the migration.
When putting together the IA strategy for the new site navigation, Northern considered how to structure the information in a way that would be useful to both current and prospective students.
Conversations with internal users revealed that they wanted the site to support prospective students by providing easy-to-find information about programs and courses, and information about applications and supports, highlighting what makes UW Bothell unique.
Over 50 subsites were created for this project, making it essential for both the navigation and branding to feel intuitive and cohesive for users. All content was harmonized under the UW Bothell branding banner, creating a sense of identity for the school and its divisions.
The responsive design is both flexible and accessible, with the Northern team providing a set of predetermined, on-brand presentation options that eliminate the need for editors to use code to create custom styling.
To ensure that IT and content managers understood how to use the new site, the Northern team conducted internal training with employees. The CMS user manual was built directly into the site, giving users the ability to walk through every step associated with content curation and allowing for the continuous onboarding of new content editors.
This project was the most architecturally ambitious higher education CMS build Northern had ever undertaken, lasting a full year.
The Northern team delivered:
Northern’s partnership with the University of Bothell led to a more cohesive CMS solution that benefitted current and future students, and Bothell’s internal teams.
By undertaking a comprehensive discovery process, Northern was able to deeply understand the challenges the Bothell team was facing with the previous version of their site, and find uniquely tailored solutions to suit internal and external users’ needs.
The new WordPress CMS provides the unity and flexibility that content editors require, while streamlining the site for better overall user experiences.
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