The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) website helps leaders in government, business, and the civic sectors make decisions that effectively address the needs of cities and communities. Therefore was hired to ensure the JCHS website lived up to its mission.
Client
Harvard University
Industry
Higher Education
Type
CMS Website
Technology
Drupal, Wordpress, Apache Solr
Partners
Pantheon
Project Link
Services Provided
UI/UX design, accessibility audits & remediation, digital strategy, technical architecture, MarTech and CRM integration, Drupal development, support & maintenance.
Therefore was initially brought in to perform an audit of the JCHS website. Key areas of concern that were noted prior to our audit were accessibility, maintainability, search result accuracy, security and performance.
The audit revealed a number of high-concern issues that would prevent JCHS from achieving its future state vision with the current implementation of the website. It was determined that a complete rebuild using the latest Drupal CMS platform and a power search service would be needed.
The key goals of this project were to:
simplify content navigation;
implement an enterprise search service to provide superior search functionality and accuracy for site visitors;
meet WCAG 2.1 / section 508 accessibility compliancy standards;
build the website using a flexible and highly capable, yet easy to use content management system;
build the site for long-term maintainability and as a platform for future-state evolution.
Informed by our audit of the JCHS website and with our understanding of key success objectives for this project we delivered a successful rebuild of the JCHS website on time and on budget.
Some highlights of our solution deliverables are detailed below:
Therefore developed an Apache Solr integrated faceted search tool that greatly increased the utility and accuracy of site search results. Users are able to segment results based on publication type, research focus areas, and across a defined date range. JCHS site administrators can tweak result priority and weight relevancy based on keywords and context.
A well architected data-model and content governance workflow ensures content is accurate and timely. We designed and delivered a collection of UI components that are used by content managers to build pages with consistency and predictability. Our landing page building empowers JCHS to build custom pages without the need to go back to our development team.
Please watch a short demonstration of how a content editor can easily build a complex layout using our Drupal based UI component page builder:
It was a critical factor to the success of this project that the JCHS website met, and where possible, exceeded all government accessibility standards. Nothing was off the table, including making changes to the JCHS brand and logo to ensure compliancy.
Thanks to the flexibility and cooperation of the JCHS team, we were able to achieve a Lighthouse 100 accessibility score for the JCHS website.
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