Completed Drupal site or project URL: https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/NYU Steinhardt has much to offer students—and that was a problem for the school’s website. The site needed to give students a simpler, less overwhelming introduction to the university, while still providing a comprehensive picture of all the school has to offer.
The breadth of available programs at NYU Steinhardt is impressive, but it presented a problem for the school’s website. Over the years, various departments and administrative units had developed their own online look-and-feel and maintained multiple sites. This approach complicated the user experience and made it difficult for prospective students to locate the programs that interested them. This issue became more apparent to the school’s web development team—and its administration—in the wake of efforts to build a responsive layout with standardized elements and to make all the templates digitally accessible. As part of those projects, the team grappled with the reality that each department—and the various sites that formed NYU Steinhardt’s online experience—used different layouts, navigation, and headers. The school needed to convey the variety of its program offerings, as well as provide necessary information for faculty, staff, and alumni. But it needed to do so in a consistent way—one that would help improve the experience for students making a significant and challenging decision.