Drupal Web Development For Higher Education Institutes & Universities

After the arrival of another wave of COVID-19 pandemic, back-to-school season is also here. For today's ed leaders, creating top-notch digital experiences is becoming complex. A university's website is made by incorporating prospective students and families, existing students, faculty, and alumni. All these users are looking for different results when visiting a higher education organization's website.

Additionally, they view this information across many types of devices and channels. Meaning, it's essential for higher education websites to be easily accessible and highly responsive to visitors. They should be able to take an interactive virtual campus tour on a tablet or mobile phone, find university news on notice boards or apply to their mobile phones.

Almost every section of our society relies on their smartphones and digital devices for online activities. You need to create a website that adapts to their way of life. Since your students and users are increasing every year, making sure your CMS can scale and meet their needs is also a must.

Then what is the best platform to build a website for education institutes or university website? Luckily, Drupal development services offer an all-in-one CMS platform that allows you to develop highly scalable and easy-to-use websites. It will enable your team to deliver technology-driven learning methods by providing flexibility, security, and robustness.

It establishes secure coordination and technological management among different departments and colleges in a university. Drupal offers practical features and modules that help you create higher education systems management websites in less time and effort. Do you think why I should choose Drupal over other CMS like WordPress? Don't worry! In this blog, next, this blog will discuss why Drupal is a perfect fit for a website for education institutes.

For education institute websites with tight budgets and limited faculty resources, the high-profile lawsuit and manually auditing large volumes of text, video, and audio files are pretty monotonous. For such websites, Drupal supports today's website accessibility standards right from helping visitors understand web pages, choosing font size and colors to meet compliance guidelines, and allowing editors to add alt text and descriptive tags to images quickly.

Open-source

Drupal is an open-source system that is suitable for universities: and helps users create websites that provide a low price, security, and flexibility for millions of students and teachers worldwide and make it easy to move to distance education so the need of an hour.

Multisite and multilingual

An educational website focuses on a holistic approach for the development of students in a lot of sections that include schools, colleges, libraries, sports teams, etc., which demands a sister domain. Therefore, multi site management is standard for higher education institutions, and Drupal's flexibility offers adequate content storage for each website.

You can share all these site content with the Domain Access Module, which allows you to configure user and content settings between or across sites. If all these sites use the same Drupal modules, you can create a joint code base. You can localize interfaces for more than a hundred languages to develop websites for education institutions worldwide.

Taxonomy

Taxonomy is a feature you can use for creating categories of content that structure website materials for new to this term. Drupal website offers taxonomy, and that's why it is easy to build a complex, multifaceted structure, where the same website material may refer to different categories.

Also Read: Drupal 8 / 9 Commerce Is Online Store On Drupal Worth?

Easy to develop

You don't have the technical expertise to administer your Drupal websites. You can achieve this basic functionality by putting several checkmarks on the menu. The in-built Drupal theme offers a layout for a website where you don't have to code it. PHP used in Drupal has a low entry threshold. Meaning, you can replace one student with another (for example- if the student is graduating soon) quickly, which helps you keep your website updated.

Access rights

Universities can develop ERP software using Drupal and create accounts for different categories of users. You can create additional access rights to functionality and data on the website. Meaning, what students see is not the same for teachers and vice versa.

Mobile friendly

How many students and teachers have a mobile phone? Almost everyone has, right? Several students and teachers use smartphones to navigate their university websites. If your university website is created on Drupal CMS, it is adapted for mobile devices by default.

These are some of the notable benefits of using Drupal for higher education websites. To get the most out of the website development using Drupal, you need to hire an expert Drupal developer or an agency to do the job for you. If you search for a Drupal development company, then AddWeb Solutions is the right platform for you.

Our expert Drupal developers can deliver all types of Drupal websites for you. Now, you know the benefits of Drupal for higher education websites, next we will discuss the five trends that all schools and universities should consider to get the most value out of their Drupal CMS.

Keep consistency with patterns

Reusable themes, modules, and UI patterns are the main things to building many consistent websites. Drupal consistency is the key to create a great experience for end-users and website content editors. Some site owners are not in favor of using a template for their website. Meaning, "one-size-fits-all" template is not going to work, but developers need to offer a set of options that universities can use and adapt to their needs.

Some modules like Layout Builder and Paragraphs with a style guide management tool like Pattern Lab can provide the flexibility that site owners need. Universities should have a shared set of modules approved for use on campus. These shared sets of modules can be a small set of custom modules.

Content governance for content editors and site owners

Easy to use and consistent tools for content editors with policies, documentation, and training will pay off in the long run. With Drupal, simplification for the content editor makes governance easier.

Embrace open source

Teams of developers active in the open-source community are much more aware of best practices and tools.

Flexibility with limitations

It will be crucial to provide site owners with flexible and easy-to-use tools in the future. At the same time, the website owners should be limited from making changes, and it will have significant advantages in the l health of a large web platform.

For example, you can remove the WYSIWYG editor and replace it with predefined fields for text, images, and links to increase the consistency and accessibility of content. By creating structured content building blocks, you can provide content editors with a tool that comes with built-in guidelines. It will ensure consistency and quality throughout your sites.

At the same time, content editors need more flexibility in building pages. Providing a tool for content editors can help them feel more independent. Look at Layout Builder and Paragraphs and set them to promote content consistency and allow editors to be creative where appropriate.

Prototype and test before you scale

While creating a Drupal-based website, don't start with the homepage or the most crucial campus page. Begin with a prototype and a pilot project. The point is, you should try out how your part of the new website works for one use case before building it for other use cases.

The higher education landscape is vast and intimidating, and universities need to respond promptly to the demands. Fortunately, Drupal has created a site with multiple functionalities and allows users to manage the university's main page from one place. It can all be done alongside giving content independence to each department associated with the institution.

Also Read: Web Development Strategy You Must Follow for a Successful Drupal 9 Upgrade

Drupal also gives site owners the flexibility to update and edit sites from a single Drupal codebase. This feature, in turn, reduces the overhead of handling code across multiple sites and putting resources into revising customized one-off sites. Need to develop a higher education website? Hire proficient Drupal developers from AddWeb Solutions at the most competitive rates.