.edu: WordPress in Higher Ed – event recap

When the Harvard Gazette relaunched its website earlier this year, it established a new benchmark for immersive, interactive storytelling in the higher education space. 

Emphasis was placed on delivering a scalable design system, prioritizing ease of use to reduce training time, and on creating custom blocks to captivate readers and tell new kinds of stories — all while maintaining the highest accessibility standards. This was possible thanks to a hugely successful partnership between Human Made and the Harvard Gazette team.

In this keynote session from Human Made and the Harvard Gazette, we take a deep dive into the features developed to simplify publishing workflows, make accessibility more approachable, and empower creators to produce beautiful, engaging content. We’ll also hear about the ways in which WordPress is underpinning success for the Harvard Gazette team.

Open source tools like WordPress mean teams working in higher education can create incredible digital experiences to ensure they remain successful in a competitive environment. But building the platform is just the first step. It’s essential your content is seen by your intended audience, and that’s what this session is all about. Yoasts’s Carolyn Shelby will explore practical strategies for maximizing the potential of WordPress-built websites in higher education.

By bringing real-life examples, key SEO trends, and best practice into the spotlight, this session will equip higher education professionals with the knowledge to transform their websites into powerful recruitment tools, capable of helping facilitate growth and success, as universities are forced to compete in an increasingly digital world.

Managing a codebase across hundreds of sites is a frequent challenge for small technical teams working in higher education, and it’s far from easy. But this is the exact scenario Human Made set out to tackle for the University of Illinois Chicago’s Technical Services team when they partnered up recently. 

The project saw a centralization of UIC’s primary website codebase into a single repository using continuous integration workflows. Human Made also combined UIC’s pattern library and website codebases, managed plugin dependencies, modernized the build process, and introduced GitHub Actions’ deploy workflows to automate pushing to Pantheon servers. 

The completion of this workflow and tooling project enabled the UIC’s Technical Services team to manage their network efficiently from one codebase while empowering new contributors to participate in site improvements. 

In this talk, we’ll learn more about the decisions behind the project, focusing on how and why we unified UIC’s codebases, set up GitHub Actions, automated deployment, implemented security and code quality tools, and used Dependabot for updates.

With customers drawn from across the higher education space, WebOps platform Pantheon has a unique perspective on the sector’s most significant trends in 2024. Here, Josh Koenig, Chief Strategy Officer, shares insights drawn from across their portfolio.

Highlighting real-world experiences across their customer base, Pantheon will provide a comprehensive overview of the latest thinking and areas of focus in higher education websites. The session will touch on areas such as best practice for managing large WordPress site portfolios, how organizations integrate design systems effectively for brand unity and accessibility, and the benefits of bringing in AI search to enhance user experience.

Arizona State University’s Engineering department maintains and operates a student research showcase website, which features more than 1200 projects gathered from over the last 12 semesters. This fantastic collection is made possible thanks to a huge collaborative effort bridging content submissions, website management, interviews, photography, organising proposals and research stipends, and the facilitation of an in-person event.

Thanks to its ability to organize all of the data and establish regular workflows for numerous editors and operators, WordPress makes all this possible. During this presentation, we’ll hear about the tools and processes leveraged to shape the content experience, how the team added a virtual event component during the pandemic, and how the university benefits from committing to the large undertaking required to support the project long-term.

Open source technology – and WordPress specifically – plays a huge role in allowing universities to attract students, represent their brands online, and thrive in an incredibly competitive digital environment. 

This panel discussion will dive into why this technology is so well-suited to such a wide variety of higher education use cases, explore real life success stories, and imagine the ways in which WordPress can evolve in the future to ensure its ongoing value to the sector.