Delaware Technical & Community College Website Redesign & Development

When Delaware Technical Community College built their site about five years ago, Drupal 6 was state of the art. After the Drupal 7core was released a few year later, however, development stopped on Drupal 6. Delaware Tech was missingout on some awesome new Drupal developments, including an all-new database layer, new modules and most importantly, entities. Entities let us add some really amazing custom functions to Drupal sites. That’s why they came to us earlier this year to make the move to Drupal 7.

Delaware Tech’s site is huge. More than 3,000 piece of content and thousands of pages. It’s also plugged into a secure class scheduling system that keeps track of course dates, times and info. Not only did we have to migrate all the school’s content, but we had to revamp the way the website accessed and displayed course data from their internal system.

We were able to move all the content, along with tags and images, to a new Drupal 7 database with some work. Then we rebuilt the way the site handles coursework info. To do it, we engineered custom tokens that can turn XML data from the course system into easy-to-read webpages and even downloadable PDFs. Now Delaware Tech staff can quickly and easily update course info using their Drupal 7 site without any cumbersome technical steps.

The site also needed a new skin, or theme. The old theme wasn’t mobile friendly and needed a complete design refresh. Our team built a new responsive theme that looks great on any size screen—from phones to tablets to desktops. Now text, images and layout changes based on screen size so viewers always get the best experience no matter what device they’re using.

About a dozen Delaware Tech staff members post content to the site. Drupal 7’s all-new user interface is faster and easier to use. Posters can also now quickly customize page layouts on the fly with easy drag-and-drop tools. Now if authors want a two-column layout that flows into a one-column layout with full-width images, they can make it themselves without the help of a developer.