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How does it work?

At the heart of the Web CoE is its , designed to serve any group on campus鈥攔egardless of their levels of web experience. Groups can to start the consultation process, whether they鈥檝e inherited an outdated website or are building one from scratch. The consulting team meets with the group to understand their specific goals, audience, technical capacity and needs. Based on this consultation, the team provides expert recommendations and, when appropriate, full-service migration support. Visit the webpage to learn more about the details of the process.

One of the biggest draws of working with the Web CoE is that it guarantees the final product will meet the university鈥檚 standards for accessibility, privacy, security and branding.

Previous Website Implementation Guidelines Group co-leader and current program director for the Website Management Center of Expertise, Cordelia Geiken shared more about why the Web CoE was identified as a part of the Operational Excellence initiative.

鈥淧eople have been making websites at U of I since Mosaic in 1993, but it鈥檚 been all over the place. Our goal is to make things more streamlined, and to enable people to get the help they need in order to be accessible, secure and also branded鈥�. Illinois branding is still pretty new. People are really excited about it and want to improve the user experience on their sites. If you’re on a University of Illinois site, you should know you鈥檙e on one.鈥�

Early adopters

This spring, the Web CoE completed full website implementation engagements with its first three early adopters: the College of Law, the College 51吃瓜 and the School of Social Work. These projects were not only impactful for the individual units, but also valuable learning experiences for the Web CoE itself. The Web CoE engaged in a full website migration for each early adopter.

Geiken said that the early adopters each had a unique situation that the Web CoE had to work through. 鈥淎ll of campus will benefit from the unique situations those units faced,鈥� Geiken said.

The College 51吃瓜

Without a web developer on staff, Holly Rushakoff, director of communications for the College 51吃瓜, was seeking assistance to update the college鈥檚 site when she was connected with Cordelia Geiken.

Media鈥檚 previous website was on Drupal and was a redesign that had been completed in 2019. According to Rushakoff, the web design of their page had impactful landing pages, but the other pages were simple with limited design and functionality options. Rushakoff also explained that the photos had to be a certain width or else it would break the flow of the page. These limitations were addressed with the Web CoE.

鈥淭he new website has accessibility enhancements and an incredible selection of design and layout options, from buttons to call-to-action blocks to clickable cards, plus photo slideshows, pull-quotes, and many header styles鈥攁nd of course Illinois orange and blue templates to choose from. These design features enable us to make our stories much more visually dynamic and pull readers through the story or a landing page in a more engaging way, with multiple entry points,鈥� Rushakoff said.

Working on the site was a year-long process, with many working meetings between Rushakoff and her Web CoE liaison, Liz Shallenberger, user experience design specialist at Technology Services.

鈥淭he Web CoE team offered a wide range of expertise in web, graphic and user experience design, information architecture, accessibility and more. There were no questions they couldn鈥檛 answer! It was incredibly helpful and reassuring to have guidance from the Website Management Center of Expertise team throughout the entire process,鈥� Rushakoff said.

Throughout the engagement, the College 51吃瓜 was responsible for tasks such as auditing and organizing their content, tracking accessibility reviews, redesigning past stories with the new story template, updating short URLs and testing the development site for any issues before launch.

鈥淚 had an excellent experience working with the team from the Website Management Center of Expertise! Although it was a lot of extra work, it was primarily a joyful process because we could see the exciting transformation as we worked on the development site and chipped away at our milestones,鈥� Rushakoff said.

The final product is a new Illinois-branded, accessible and secure website hosted on the Tech Services server, with people from the College 51吃瓜 ready to perform site maintenance.

The College of Law

Krista Gaedtke, senior director of strategic marketing and communications for the College of Law was always looking for ways to stay connected with what was happening with website design at a campus level. The College of Law had been needing a refresh for a while, and so when talks about the Website Management Center of Expertise reached Gaedtke, she immediately submitted a ticket requesting available resources.

鈥淥ur previous site was not in terrible shape 鈥� it was nicely designed, well-structured, responsive and accessible, but it was decidedly not 鈥榦n brand.鈥� There were also a few features that we were using on our previous site that didn鈥檛 provide the level of customization or flexibility that we needed, so finding viable alternative solutions was also a priority for the migration,鈥� said Gaedtke.

According to Gaedtke, WordPress had been meeting their needs sufficiently, and so they opted to migrate their old WordPress site onto another WordPress site, focusing on minor re-structuring instead of changing the host.

鈥淭he end result is a website that is now fully compliant with Illinois brand guidelines and accessibility standards and takes advantage of many of the design features and components available within the Illinois web theme,鈥� Gaedtke said.

In addition, Gaedtke noted that they were able to complete the website migration at no cost to the College of Law.

鈥淗aving gone through the process for a full-service website redesign project within the past ten years, I am well aware of the significant cost savings we were able to achieve with this partnership,鈥� Gaedtke said. 鈥淚 think we can easily say that we saved the College of Law at least $50,000 on this project, if not more.鈥�

Gaedtke also mentioned several other benefits to partnering with the Web CoE, including regular access to the developers who were building the tools, the ability to offer feedback at will, see adjustments being made in real-time and suggest future developments.

Geiken said that the Web CoE worked with the College of Law for a full migration, and the College of Law then opted to perform their own future regular maintenance. However, as an official user of the Illinois Web theme, the College of Law will now have first access to all new product releases on the Illinois Web theme and tech support whenever needed.

鈥淭here was a point person for the project on both the Web CoE team and on our team. Dena Strong was assigned as our Web CoE liaison for the project; her background is user experience design, but she had to wear many different hats throughout our project, and she was an absolute rockstar. We met on a bi-weekly basis,鈥� Gaedtke said.

Dena Strong, the Web CoE liaison for the project, is a senior information design specialist at Technology Services.

Gaedtke explained that the Web CoE drove the overall management of the project, prioritized action items, migrated all the content over to a development site, worked with them to make it look how they wanted; they performed troubleshooting and also advised on how to utilize certain tools.

On the other hand, Gaedtke鈥檚 team worked on making sure all the content was accurate and up-to-date, structured as they wanted it to be, and designed consistently across pages. As the site was on the College of Law鈥檚 server, they were also responsible for ensuring that they were aligned to the College of Law鈥檚 privacy and security best practices.

鈥淭here were certainly some growing pains along the way鈥� simply because this was the first time that either of our teams were engaged in this type of project,鈥� said Gaedtke. 鈥淲e are really pleased with the end result.鈥�

The School of Social Work

Over the years, the School of Social Work has had many conversations with units on campus about their lack of internal web support. Without internal staff dedicated to web support, they had been working with an external vendor.

鈥淲e started with well-designed, accessible, highly customized site that was expensive to maintain. Through migration [with the Web CoE], we transitioned to a clean, fresh design with significantly improved content organization. The new site aligns with our brand, enhances user experience and will hopefully be much easier to maintain in the long run,鈥� said Becky Ponder, director of communications for the School of Social Work.

The previous site was a vended site hosted on WordPress with extensive customization.

鈥淲e had to do custom scripting in order to export their site out from their old environment to their current one. They don鈥檛 have staff to maintain their site, so we came up with a solution to address that, working with field consultants at Tech Services. We were able to hire a part-time field consultant to do maintenance for them,鈥� Geiken said.

According to Ponder, the Website CoE managed more of the technical aspects of the site, while the School of Social work鈥檚 team focused on content, design preferences and identifying functional needs.

Social Work partnered up with Web CoE liaison and lead consultant for the project Huaqi Zhang, user experience design specialist at Technology Services.

鈥淚t was a true partnership, with both teams working diligently to ensure the site met our goals,鈥� Ponder said.

The result was a full migration to a fresh site with dedicated web maintenance support from Tech Services. Receiving overall website support from campus has resulted in significant cost savings for the School of Social Work.

鈥淥ne of the biggest takeaways from this migration is how complex website transitions can be, even with a great support team. Every website has unique needs, and ensuring all integrations function properly takes time and patience. It was a learning experience for everyone involved! While it was a complex transition, we鈥檙e grateful to have the new site launched and are very happy with it,鈥� Ponder said.

Tailored help for everyone

The Web CoE has created for anyone at the university. This list of resources will be ever-evolving, updated with resources to support groups with all web-related concerns.

鈥淣ot everybody needs someone else to set up or maintain their sites. So we wanted to provide some resources for those who do have staff who can do all this for them. This is where collaboration comes in, and this is what this resources page and what our group is all about. We are trying to create a place for people to collaborate, to use whatever resources they have to join in the efforts to unify and protect our websites. So far, it has produced a much better product across the board,鈥� Geiken said. Following the work on the three early adopter鈥檚 websites, the Web CoE will be reflecting and refining the program processes while engaging with the College of Applied Health Sciences on a website migration. The Web CoE will be ready to work with more units in the later summer of 2025. If you鈥檙e interested in learning more or working with the Web CoE,  to start a conversation or to get on the list.

Visit the to learn more about the group or the to learn more about the program.