Northeastern University

Challenge

Redwerk collaborated with the Marketing Department of Northeastern University. They looked for someone with a solid track record of building, customizing, and redesigning WordPress solutions to help them simplify content publishing and website maintenance.

They also needed an IT services provider who could accommodate their software testing needs for several campus sites so they didn’t have to search for another IT vendor.

The Marketing Department of Northeastern University developed a dedicated resource for brand governance, initially built with the Divi framework. The latter turned out to be quite cumbersome and introduced unnecessary complexities. That’s why they decided to rebuild the site using a custom WordPress theme developed in-house.

Let’s briefly go over our client’s requirements:

• Custom theme. We were asked to recreate the old brand governance site with their custom theme utilizing the Gutenberg block editor. We also needed to introduce changes to the main menu, link styles, button styles, card styles, and animations.
• Minimum use of additional CSS & JS. We were expected to implement the desktop and mobile versions of the website using built-in styling options and classes. Custom CSS & JS code had to be brought down to a minimum.
• Software testing. The Redwerk team working on this project included one QA engineer dedicated to testing the brand center portal and another responsible for testing Arlington, Mills, Oakland, and Charlotte campus sites. We needed to verify the sites’ compliance with the mockups and perform cross-browser and cross-platform testing.

Lastly, our client expected a timely delivery per their development and review schedule.

Solution

We started with building out each page using the block editor to identify patterns in the layouts and mark-up. Once that was ready, we styled the blocks with CSS so they matched the design of the original site. A couple of functionalities, such as color swapping, required custom JS.

We then proceeded with developing responsive layouts and layering in animations. The Northeastern University development team carefully reviewed each step so we could apply fixes and other tweaks right away.

On our end, we tested the website when it was fully completed – in Microsoft Edge, Mozilla, Safari, and Chrome. Mobile and tablet versions were tested in Safari and Chrome. We ensured the design implementation fully matched the mockups; there were no broken links, cut-off or overly compressed images on mobile, design inconsistencies, and other functional and UI defects.

As for testing Arlington, Mills, Oakland, and Charlotte campus sites, the goal was the same. After careful examination, we found only minor issues like wrong redirects, improper alignment of blocks on smaller mobile screens, incorrect order of content sections, etc.

Overall, in less than two months, we built out 30 pages, including an email signature generator page. Additional time was spent on the review process on the client’s side, bug fixing, and final polishing touches.