Guidance Builds Scalable Solution for Occidental College

CHALLENGE

The nationally recognized, private residential college of the liberal arts and sciences, wanted to promote its 125 anniversary and rebuild its .edu site. The project required a scalable and malleable environment that was easy-to-update with minimal IT involvement post-launch.

SOLUTION

Guidance custom developed both the anniversary site and 10,000+ page .edu site on Drupal

For the anniversary site, Guidance designed and developed it to feature profiles of renowned alumni such as President Barack Obama and Academy Award-winning actor Ben Affleck. Guidance also integrated social sharing capability to encourage viral marketing of this site.

For the .edu site, Guidance enabled content administrators to grow the site at will through Drupal’s intuitive CMS, drag and drop features, content feeds, and customizable layouts and menus.

Both sites were integrated with Facebook and Twitter.

INNOVATION

• Users can nominate noted alumni to appear on the anniversary site.
• Users can share alumni profiles on various social networks in just one click.
• Each department user is offered a selection of five different layouts to accommodate varying content requirements. When one of the five is selected, the chosen layout’s creative is incorporated into all its subpages.
• Robust permission control is provided to administrative users with an “update once, reflect everywhere” approach for the .edu site. For example, only the registrar’s office can update the course catalog and those updates are immediately reflected throughout each department’s pages, if the department admin selects to display course content.
• Content management redundancy is also alleviated through an automatic feed. For example, when an event is created and assigned a departmental sponsor, that event will automatically populate the designated department’s calendar.