Some schools or departments may need to have customized look, perhaps to align with pre-existing branding, address unique audiences, or more faithfully represent unique features of the department and its mission, while still leveraging the rich set of capabilities templates and components in the Library to help speed development and achieve budget efficiencies. For these departments, IfThen offers the Custom Program, which begins with a full discovery process including stakeholder interviews, competitive research, analytics, and content analysis. The end result is a custom design for your department built on the foundation of the component library.

• Full discovery process with stakeholder interviews, competitive site assessments, and analytics research
• Full project brief
• Design concepts
• Custom designs
• Custom components and templates as needed
• Access to entire library of templates and components updated to new custom design
• Ability to create additional custom templates using CMS
• Workshop approach to content mapping and training
• Access to training video library
• Bulk content migration support
• On-going support option
• Components and templates to adhere to current website accessibility standards ((WCAG) 2.1, Level AA.) in keeping with the University’s standards

News sites at Universities can often be mundane press release sites. We worked with the University’s Communication Office to build an engaging news site, drawing on our experience at CNN.com and our deep history at the University. We began with two questions: what is the story we are trying to tell, and what does the data tell us. The answer to the former was straightforward: we are trying to share with the world research, discoveries, and new understandings that have a real impact. We developed a story template and a suite of components that would allow the site to present stories in an authoritative, visual style inspired by the historical style of the University of Chicago Press. The answer to “what does the data tell us?” lead us to realize that very little traffic goes to the News home page, and instead goes directly to stories. Thus, we designed a compact home page that could be appended to the bottom of every story page, making every story page a home page.

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See the News Site

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