CDU's New Drupal Platform

We worked with Charles Darwin University to redesign and redevelop their site in Drupal 8. We continue to partner with CDU to ensure their digital ecosystem delivers on their strategy and positions them as a premium Australian higher education organisation through both ongoing support and enhancements. 

Client
Charles Darwin University
Industry
Higher Education
Service types
Content and UX
Drupal and Web Development
Charles Darwin University Feature Image

Context

Over time, a need emerged for the entire structure, design and guiding principles of the CDU website to be realigned. The architecture, design and functionality of the original site no longer met the needs of the university’s internal and external users and no longer reflected their emerging strategy, brand values and priorities.

THE SOLUTION

With the commencement of the project, workshops were conducted both on campus and in Sydney during the discovery phase in order to identify the key user personas. PreviousNext then conducted user testing across Australia to get feedback on the new designs that were in flight at the time, using this research as a platform from which we could adjust designs accordingly.

The comprehensive discovery phase resulted in a well-defined product vision and UX strategy that could be used as a solid guide as we moved into the build phase of the project. Utilising the Agile framework, the PreviousNext team collaborated closely with the Charles Darwin team, working in two week sprints to power through the backlog of work. Regular sprint reviews gave CDU the opportunity to test and provide feedback throughout the development phase. 

THE OUTCOME

A new Homepage and “Study with CDU” section for the Charles Darwin University website was launched with pages that were built entirely with a newly-developed library of Drupal components in Drupal 8. The new library of components made available to CDU allows internal content editors to now build custom pages across the website by selecting the component(s) of their choice. 

We continue to work with Charles Darwin University, with further developments to their site planned for the future.