Top Picks for Higher Education Attendees at DrupalCon Pittsburgh
The Pennsylvanian capital is hosting this year’s DrupalCon — the annual global meetup dedicated to the Drupal CMS, which is the top choice platform for higher education websites.
It’s amazing to look forward to how the conference in the “City of Bridges” will be building bridges within the Drupal community. At DrupalCon, creators and users of Drupal digital experiences will be discussing the CMS’ hottest trends.
Attendees from the higher education sector will have a chance to meet their peers, listen to top experts, share their use cases, and find agency partners. DrupalCon 2023 will be a great place to discover new ways, practices, and tools offered by the ever-evolving CMS to optimize higher-ed websites for better student engagement and retention. Our team at ImageX have handpicked some exciting DrupalCon 2023 sessions that might be of interest to representatives of universities and colleges.
Top DrupalCon Pittsburgh 2023 sessions for higher education attendees
Multisites, microteam: Maintaining multi-tenant web properties at Harvard Medical School — by Antonio Savorelli (antiorario) and michael_garofalo
It is common for universities to have dozens of departments and offices. So higher education is one of those sectors that genuinely benefit from Drupal’s multisite option (and that’s one of the reasons why top universities choose Drupal). In a multisite setup, a set of interconnected websites for specific departments are created, updated, and managed from one place, sharing the same Drupal core, codebase, and available extensions. At the same time, every website has its own content, user profiles, configuration, base domains, and more. It’s a great balance of autonomy and consistency.
Maintaining websites in a Drupal multisite setup may look tricky, but the attendees of DrupalCon Pittsburgh 2023’s exciting session by Antonio Savorelli and michael_garofalo will learn firsthand how to make it as seamless as possible. The speakers are going to use the example of Harvard Medical School — a vast decentralized organization that uses the Drupal multisite approach.
Based on the experience of Harvard Medical School’s web team, there are three pillars of effective multisite management. Each of the pillars is going to be discussed in every detail at the session, but here they are in a nutshell:
- proper communication with stakeholders or tenants
- swift support workflows with clear priorities
- a solid development infrastructure.
Audience Experience: The “WHY” of Content Management — by Jeffrey McGuire (horncologne) and Tracy Evans (trayevans)
At ImageX, we’ve previously collated some compelling content marketing tips for higher education websites. Still, it looks like one important tip should be added to the list, which is to check out the content-related sessions by experienced speakers Jeffrey McGuire and Tracy Evans whenever your path takes you to DrupalCon.
“You’re the experts on making your CMS sing” shares the session’s description. It will cover how Audience Experience should be seen as the intersection of content strategy and content management. Providing a better Audience Experience helps you get the most out of Drupal for yourself and your clients.
At the session, you’ll discover how to improve the Audience Experience by applying objective criteria to content creation and content quality. Next, you’ll gain insights into assessing and improving the ways of how their Drupal implementation supports your content efforts. Finally, the session is going to provide guidance on boosting the Audience Experience based on the collaboration between marketers and developers.
Do I Actually Need a Redesign Right Now? — by Bjorn Thomson (bthomson)
Looking to freshen up your higher-education website, as well as resolve some lingering technical issues? You might be tempted to jump into a redesign. Indeed, redesigns can be exciting, but the flip sideis that they require a lot of budget and time from your team.
Budget and time are limited resources that higher-education organizations cannot take for granted. That’s why it’s worth considering whether a website redesign is the right solution for your team. There are a number of practical improvements you can make to your website without breaking the bank, all while adding significant value. This doesn’t cancel any possible redesign plans in the future — your website will just be more prepared and in better shape.
Welcome to the super useful DrupalCon Pittsburgh 2023 session by Bjorn Thomson of ImageX where you’ll gain insights into how to evaluate your need for a redesign, identify the impactful improvements, implement them on your website, and assess the results.
Get Going with Google Analytics 4 — by Heather Wozniak (heatherwoz)
Without a doubt, using Google Analytics is one of the best ways to track and analyze how your users interact with the website. The valuable insights obtained from GA can help higher education marketers identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions about website content and design.
Every marketer will have been keeping up with the discussions around the latest version— Google Analytics 4, with it being the biggest shake up to date and replacing Universal Analytics by July 1, 2023, so it’s time to switch to GA4 for those who haven’t yet.
Heather Wozniak will walk attendees through the steps of installing and configuring the Google Tag Manager module module so you can fully use the capabilities of GA4. You’ll discover what user activities are tracked by default, how to add conditions to only track users with certain roles, how to track custom events (e.g. clicks on specific buttons), and more.
Higher Education Industry Summit
In addition to the main DrupalCon Pittsburgh 2023 program, there is also a day-long event fully dedicated to digital experiences in higher education. The Higher Education Industry Summit is not included in a regular DrupalCon ticket — anyone can add it to their program as an extra option.
All attendees from universities and colleges will be socializing, sharing their ideas, and learning new things in a relaxed and informal atmosphere. Insightful sessions in a variety of formats will allow the audience to take a deeper dive into the higher education sector specifics. Among the formats are a keynote, lightning talks, case studies, panel-style Q&A sessions, and attendee-driven table topic discussions.
Some educational institutions to be featured in the Summit’s discussions are Yale University, McGill University, University of Missouri, University of Waterloo, and Georgia Tech Library. The topics include large-scale website upgrades, migrations to Drupal from other CMSs, onboarding developers on a team, optimizing the authoring experiences, and so much more.
Let’s meet at DrupalCon 2023!
Here at the ImageX, we have our own DrupalCon traditions. Among them include being a champion sponsor, session speaker(s), and dedicated attendee(s).. We were so happy to attend DrupalCon Portland 2022 in-person, and we are just as delighted to see everyone at DrupalCon Pittsburgh 2023.
Higher education attendees at DrupalCon are particularly special to us, since a large part of our work includes several different colleges and universities. So come visit us at booth # to talk all things Drupal.
