How Prospective Undergraduates Navigate Websites — and What They Expect From College Content
At Eastern Standard, we do a lot of work in the higher education space. And, as a firm that is passionate about user-centric design and content strategy, we've done a lot of research into the browsing behavior of prospective undergraduates: the digital natives who have very different expectations and habits from the previous generation. Here are a few high-level takeaways from some of our...
Connecting to Instagram and other social media in WordPress using Advanced Custom Fields
As a web developer, it’s not a stretch to say that social media feed integration has become a de rigueur project spec for any new website I take on. Clients realize that when done right, these feeds can increase traffic, boost revenue, and improve engagement with their brand. When working on the WordPress platform, there are many different approaches to take — some of which are more desirable...
To Create a Web Component Library, Think Like a Lego Master Builder
To develop for the web is, by nature and necessity, to be a problem-solver. While my personal path to web development has taken many turns (including photography, 3D animation, and game design), none has been more foundational to my knowledge of good programming principles and problem-solving skills than Lego. My hobby of designing Lego cars — one that lives at the intersection of design,...
Digital First - Rethinking the College Viewbook
Over the years, we have worked with many colleges and universities on a wide array of marketing materials, and we have found one common denominator when it comes to traditional student viewbooks: They tend to look and sound the same. The formulaic approach that so many colleges take to this printed brochure geared towards incoming students generally includes uninspired photography — students...
Building Component-based WordPress Sites
What Are Components? Components can be thought of as discrete, reusable building blocks that make up larger design systems for the web. Because they are developed with modularity in mind, editing or even removing a component will have a low impact on the rest of the system. This makes our Wordpress sites easier to test since we’ve developed each component independently of one another — and also...
Progressive Decoupling With Drupal 8 and ReactJS
Pitfalls, “gotchas,” and lessons learned while creating a new Admissions site for UPenn One of the things I really enjoy about the work we do at Eastern Standard is that we get to evaluate new (or new-to-us) technologies on a regular basis. Every new project is a chance to discover or revisit a wide range of technologies and methods that might help us bring to life what our clients and design...
SEO in 2018: How User Experience and Content Strategy Influence Search Rankings
Pretend, for a moment, that it’s 2008. George Bush is still president of the U.S., The Dark Knight is tearing up the box office, and a then-unknown Katy Perry was breaking into the mainstream with the single “I Kissed a Girl.” Man, I feel old after writing that. Also during this era, search optimization (SEO) was mostly about stuffing keywords and submitting for backlinks, along with some other...
Drupal 8 Search: How to Get Better, More Intuitive Search Results using Search API
We’ve recently run into some challenges getting Drupal 8 to return intuitive search results, especially when using the paragraphs module to build pages. This article will discuss configuration options to get search to behave better. You’ll be able to: Get search to produce more intuitive results; Give content managers control (or at least influence) over the order of search results for certain...
Easy Social Feeds With the Drupal Migrate API
On Saturday, Feb. 3, I had the opportunity to present a talk at DrupalCampNJ entitled “Easy Social Feeds with the Migrate API .” The full presentation audio can be found here . I’ve also made the slide deck available here . More and more customers are looking for ways to embed social media feeds on their websites. These requests range from the simple (one carousel that shows the most recent five...
Bonsai and the Art of Website Maintenance
A couple of years ago, I was moving my father out of my childhood home when I stumbled across a book titled The Japanese Art of Miniature Trees and Landscapes . After a couple of months, I finally decided to sit down and read it, but I was left with a ton of questions. How were these trees kept so small? How do they keep this shape? And how do they stay alive for so long as to get passed down...
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