They initially chose NEWMEDIA for the complex web development side only, choosing to utilize a design/branding vendor to handle the aesthetic considerations, and keep the look and feel consistent with their entire CU brand. However, after the original design vendor couldn’t keep up with the requirements, drastically delaying the schedule, and threatening to bring the whole project down before it was even finished, NEWMEDIA stepped in to save the day.
We took over the complete project. Our Denver website design team worked with our Drupal developers, start to finish, and completed it in a matter of weeks. The results have been very positively received by everyone from Alumni to Regents, Faculty to prospective students.
One of the more exciting stats as a result of this project is this: prior to NEWMEDIA developing the new site in Drupal, CU dedicated 5 full-time personnel to the management of the old site. This 200 hour/week resource allocation was necessary, due to the extent of tedious management characteristics of a static site with 5000+ pages. After NEWMEDIA completed CU’s site in Drupal and trained their key technical personnel to use it, they were able to reduce the resource required to manage it from 200 hours/week to just 20 hours/week – a 90% reduction in time and associated cost!
In addition to helping CU embrace a new, complex CMS like Drupal, we also trained their internal technical personnel in Drupal development, management and hosting/systems administration. This “teach a man to fish” model allowed CU to fully take over the new site, as well as create additional new Drupal sites without external resources. CU has now become one of the thought leaders in the Drupal space, with their technical resources regularly presenting at Drupal meetups and even DrupalCon. They’ve also continued to make changes to the site since we completed it, from development to design, as it is a living, evolving Drupal application.
NEWMEDIA continues to work with CU to this day on a variety of University of Colorado web design projects most recently on the website design and development of a new site for the International Studies program at CU Boulder and another site for the Natural History Museum.