Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis

artsci.wustl.edu

“Because our site is built in Drupal, our content is easy to maintain without a high level of technical skill — a big concern for our team.”
— Gayle Kohmetscher, Director of Communications, Arts & Sciences, Washington University

With 600 faculty and more than 5,000 students, Arts & Sciences is the intellectual hub of Washington University in St. Louis. Encompassing the undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education divisions, A&S is a diverse mix of students, faculty, and staff, who have traditionally identified primarily with their individual departments or areas and less with A&S as a whole. Arts & Sciences wanted a distinctive Web presence that would increase awareness about A&S resources and help foster a greater sense of community.

The old A&S Web site had a dated design and a neglected feel. In collaboration with Petrick Design, which helped A&S develop its identity, Palantir completely overhauled the site and provided updated versions of existing content. The new site gleams with interesting and compelling features. Searchable faculty profiles include photos, course overviews, research, publications, and contact information. The home page displays upcoming news and events. An RSS feed allows news junkies to stay constantly up-to-date. Rotating human interest stories (called “possibilities”) about people, programs, and research going on in the various A&S schools lend a fresh feel to a site that is now elegant — and most important — useful.

Palantir built the site in Drupal, which is rapidly gaining recognition as one of the industry’s leading content management platforms. Powerful and secure, Drupal adheres to best practices and is robust enough to handle nearly everything asked of it. Best of all, it’s flexible — in programmer terms, “bendy.” The look and feel can be modified as needed, while customizable modules provide additional functionality.

Because Drupal is open source, users and developers benefit from the knowledge and expertise of the hundreds of people writing code for it. Palantir, part of the Drupal development community, contributes code back to the project to further enhance the platform’s functionality. During development of the A&S site we designed modules that allow for the creation of dynamic sitemap pages and increased administrative flexibility when controlling Drupal’s pagecaching system.

The look and feel of the A&S site is now being carried throughout other school sites at Washington University, setting a tone for the university’s bright new face to the world. At Palantir, our goal is to uncover the most direct straight shot to meeting our clients’ needs. The creativity is in where we find it.