What CMS to choose for higher education website development and design?
Developing a website for a higher education institution may be tough, as universities have plenty of departments and branches.
Despite the fact that each department has its own site with specific content, all of them have to function under the same CMS and be closely connected. How do you know which CMS is right for your university website? Let’s sort things out!
Drupal vs WordPress for higher education institutions
The most popular choices for higher education institutions websites are Drupal and WordPress. However, WP lacks functionality, security, and accessibility necessary for a complicated higher education institution platform.
Did you know that 71 out of the top 100 universities, including Harvard University, University of Oxford, and Yale, use Drupal for their websites? It’s not surprising if you are familiar with all of Drupal benefits.
Today, the team at Drudesk explores the benefits of Drupal for university website development.
Drupal’s benefits for university websites
Drupal offers a bunch of tools and features necessary for a complicated university website development. Here are the main ones:
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Accessibility
Caring about accessibility for users with physical disabilities is a must. Drupal 8 possess a number of features that support website accessibility standards. They help screen readers understand web pages, add alt text for images, take care of fonts and colors, and much more.
Note that you can always contact Drudesk for a website accessibility audit to see if your website is optimized for people with impairments.
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Information security
University websites contain a lot of valuable content that should be kept safe. Luckily, Drupal is one of the most secure CMS, as it offers regular core, modules, and security updates. With Drupal you can be sure that your platform maintains the highest level of security.
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User roles and permissions
University websites are visited by professors, students, administration staff, and much more. All of them need different permissions for creating and editing website content based on their roles at the university. Drupal offers out-of-the-box user roles, as well as a number of contributed user access modules that will help you easily configure roles and permissions on the site.
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Multilingual functionality
Drupal 8 possess a multilingual feature out-of-the-box. This is extremely useful for higher education institutions, as students all over the globe will access the website. Drupal translates all information available, from content to interface, and offers a choice of 100+ languages to install on websites.
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A multisite approach
Multisiting is usual for higher education institutions, as they have different departments that require sister domains. Things become easy with the Drupal multisite feature that lets you have as many websites as you need on the same Drupal installation. It provides unlimited opportunities for sharing content, managing the settings, and giving access between multiple sites.
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Easy content creation and editing
Higher education websites update and add content regularly. Drupal 8 is a solution for content creators, as it possesses a number of built-in features for easy content creation, from posting to editing.
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Hundreds of themes and templates
Drupal offers various design templates that are pretty much effortless to use while ensuring consistency across an entire institution.
Great examples of higher education websites built in Drupal
Stanford Graduate School of Business
Develop a website for a higher education institution on Drupal!
Take a look at the Maryland Global University, a website created by our web development partners: InternetDevels agency. It is supplied by the eCommerce functionality for buying online courses, as well as Moodle integration — a well-known LMS (learning management system).
Don’t hesitate over the choice of CMS for university website development anymore — Drupal is definitely the solution! Drop us a line regarding your project and we’ll immediately get back to you to discuss all the details of the project.