The Challenge
Northeastern University is a private university that enrolls more than 15.000 thousand students. It offers different undergraduate or graduate programs on its main campus in Boston and satellite campuses across the US.
One of their most extraordinary digital communication challenges was to have an agile platform that let communication managers create campaigns in a matter of minutes following Northeastern’s brand system.
By then, they were using different frameworks for developing their college or department’s websites and other hosting solutions, making it difficult to maintain and creating excessive overhead.
The solution
We were asked to adapt their UI Framework into a WordPress theme. This framework, named kernl, resulted from years of work and included different layers that covered Accessibility, Plugin’s Management, Search Features, among others.
We relied on the starter theme Sage 10, one of the most popular open-source projects in PHP, from the Roots project, which we have been using and supporting since 2014.
We developed a “Block and Component” Based theme using Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), Blade Templating features, and a combination of Tailwind and AlpineJS for the front-end.
The result
After the theme implementation, the release’s time to create websites and campaigns dropped, and Northeastern’s stakeholders could manage their content using a very flexible and atomic tool.
Sites performance enhanced, leading to better positioning due to SEO, and more lead conversions from prospects.
These new websites were hosted on a single hosting provider, which led to lower costs and centralized customer support from the company.
With 40Q, I was able to find a talented partner to help me deal with complex coding challenges while proactively proposing new solutions to make my agency project delightful.
TIM ALBERT
Director of Digital Strategy