The UCSF Drupal Web Starter Kit project has been our most successful university project to date. It has empowered UCSF to roll out sites for small departments, offices, and researchers in a matter of minutes.

Just 3 months after launch, 70 sites have gone live.

"This fills a tremendous need at UCSF. We're very happy with it." – Lisa Magargal, UCSF

Here are a few examples of sites leveraging the Drupal Web Starter Kit:

1. Diabetes Center
2. UCSF Depression Center
3. Drupal Web Starter Kit

The problem

UCSF has hundreds of small web properties for offices, researchers and small departments who don’t have the budgets and resources to create custom websites. Historically these groups have been left to their own devices to cobble together sites by whatever means necessary. These sites grow quickly out of date, are hard to maintain and rarely adhere to UCSF brand guidelines. 

UCSF created an initiative to build a Drupal install profile that they could offer to these groups at minimal cost and effort. UCSF turned to Chapter Three to design and build this solution.

The solution

1. A flexible information architecture

   Because this web solution had to work for small departments, offices, and researchers, we needed to find some common ground in how the sites were structured, while still providing enough flexibility for end users to modify the site’s structure to fit their needs. 

   We began by creating menu structure consisting of “Home, About, News, Events, Publications, Services and People”.  We arrived at this list after careful research of the commonalities across sites for the three key audiences. This meant that when a new website was created, the new client would have a primary navigation menu which was already created. They could then add items to the menu as needed, customizing it to fit their specific needs. 

   We also created specific content types for News & Events. Events were structured so that they could show upcoming and past.  Over time it is our goal to extend the project to create structure around more content including Publications and People.

2. Three different palettes 

   We collaborated with UCSF’s brand specialist to ensure that our designs were approved at the highest level to properly represent the look and feel of the University. We delivered three different color palettes of the template so that end users could pick the color scheme they liked most for their site.

3. Robust content display options

   To empower the admins to have more control of the key content regions, we designed a WISYWIG editor with the power to do far more than add text, links and images. All project administrators can add:

   • vertical tabs
   • accordions
   • tool tips

   Additionally, special care was taken to ensure that the back end system could be easily controlled by individuals who self identified as “non-technical” people.

4. Responsive design framework

   The future is device agnostic. As screen sizes multiply by the day, we knew that delivering a fully responsive site was paramount for the long term success of this project. We accounted for this with a fully responsive solution which provides legible content on any device interface. Since this solution was meant for hundreds of groups at UCSF, accounting for the long term viability of the website was fundamental to it’s success.

Thanks to UCSF

We appreciate the opportunity to work with an amazing client like UCSF. The project has been a resounding success for all involved. We look forward to building on this framework long into the future to better equip UCSF's groups with the tools they need to do their jobs.