Boise State Univerity
Boise State University is a diverse and vibrant campus with over 26,000 students from every US state and over 60 foreign countries. The university is committed to academic excellence and groundbreaking research. Its campus is constantly growing with state-of-the-art facilities for research, living, dining, technology, and visual arts.
BoiseState.edu
Boise State University came to WebDevStudios needing ongoing WordPress development work and support. With this type of monthly website development plan, Boise State can depend on WebDevStudios to keep BoiseState.edu updated, secured, and optimized for success. This includes, but is not limited to:
- Feature enhancements
- Refactor features
- Bug fixes
Not long after partnering with WebDevStudios as an ongoing WordPress development client, Boise State required data migration from its on-premises server to a WebOps platform with automated processes and enterprise-level security. WebDevStudios is proud to have played a part in this critical transition.
Data Migration
This client’s migration was an impactful experience for everyone involved. That’s because Boise State maintained its own on-premises server but desired to move to a WebOps platform. The chosen solution was our partner: Pantheon.
Pantheon is known for its high performance, speed, uptime, and scalability. When we learned of Boise State’s decision to migrate to Pantheon, we fully supported the decision and assisted with the transition. WebDevStudios has always understood the benefits of being a web agency with established partnerships in place.
Boise State’s multisite network database is large and complex. As such, the migration process had to be gradual and incremental. Pantheon focused on migrating the mission-critical parts of Boise State’s multisite network first.
Once all phases of the migration were completed, there were still bug fixes and developmental work that needed to be moved from Boise State’s on-premises server directly to the Pantheon environment. This deployment included the following:
- Syncing files from production to the Pantheon environment
- Pulling down from the source and pushing updates to the Pantheon environment, ensuring that all bug fixes and other development work were included
- Merging two separate repositories into one single Pantheon repository
Boise State University Testimonial
“WebDevStudios really helped us by establishing what we consider to be a next-generation dev-ops pipeline for our WordPress environment. Our WDS partners helped us figure out before the move what the new process would be like and gave us guidance to ensure that everything moved smoothly, to make sure that the pipeline was set up and running in what we consider to be a best-practice manner. And they helped us to create that dev-test-production environment that we’ve always wanted. We really couldn’t have done it without the advice and guidance of WebDevStudios.”
~ Shad Jessen, Director of IT Communications and University Web Strategy
Ongoing WordPress Development
Your website is kind of a big deal. That’s why WebDevStudios offers large-scale ongoing WordPress development and support. Enterprise-level organizations like Boise State University come to WebDevStudios for monthly assistance with security, updates, and enhancements. Here are some specialized tasks we have completed for Boise State so far.
Custom Stats Panel
WebDevStudios created a customized panel for Boise State’s website. This is called the Stats Panel. Its purpose is to display statistics, such as alumni membership or jobs held by graduates, that are chosen by the editorial staff.
A panel is a custom-written building block that works much like an ACF block. However, it’s more complex. Panels are compatible with Boise State’s specific custom-built theme, which means they require specialized coding.
The Stats Panel that WebDevStudios custom-built for Boise State is the first-ever new additional panel created specifically for this website since its launch with its current theme. Other panels have been tweaked and refactored, but the Stats Panel is a newly-built, customized addition for BoiseState.edu.
Improved UX
We took a Hero Panel and refactored it to improve UX. The Hero Panel is used on only one page: the main university homepage. It features an extra-large blue rhomboid design that sits on top of the hero image, which contains text. A problem occurred when the rhomboid design covered up many of the focal points of the included images, making it difficult to select the right images to fit the design and impairing UX.
Boise State required a redesign of the Hero Panel to solve the problem and improve the website’s user experience. The WebDevStudios frontend team adjusted the website’s styling and modified other code to meet Boise State’s design requirements. Now, the blue rhomboid design of the Hero Panel no longer disrupts the user’s experience when viewing the featured images.
Improved Accessibility
Accessibility matters. As a part of our ongoing WordPress development, WebDevStudios continuously works on fixes and quality improvements to ensure that all areas of Boise State are accessible to everyone, no matter what device they use.
When Boise State came to WDS initially, we quickly addressed and improved a broad range of accessibility issues. One example was an issue the client had with keyboard navigation.
Users dependent on keyboard navigation may have found themselves stuck when navigating BosieState.edu. Our team used JavaScript to fix the issue. Now, users can navigate the menu using their keyboard without getting stuck.