Student Affairs IT Launches New Responsive Site

The Division of Student Affairs Department of Information Technology has just launched a new site. The site is based upon WordPress and uses a very popular theme called Avada by Themefusion, which is billed as the #1 selling WordPress theme in the world. We selected Avada primarily because it is very responsive. But also because the built-in theme feature set is so robust, that you can do almost any type of design without a large amount of custom CSS work. This makes it a good theme for our departmental customers who want to have a sharp looking site without having to wait for IT to mock it up. The site is also integrated into our departmental Twitter feed so stories go out via social media.

From a manager’s perspective, you’ll notice that the new site has areas for projects, IT governance, and stories. We decided to combine a number of historically separate sites into one, thus simplifying maintenance. While the primary purpose of the site is to act as a portal for customers to get help and request projects, it also will eventually serve as a repository of information which documents our processes. While these areas are not fully built out yet, they will grow over time.

Another neat feature is the form allowing users to submit a question. We programmed the form to submit the question directly into our ServiceNow service desk queue which results in a quick response to customer inquiries while also providing data to create frequently asked questions, thus helping our teams to build our our knowledge management.