Ball State University Wordpress Themes

Overview

Ball State University has many faculty members, departments, centers, and institutes that needed a platform to share their content while adhering to university brand guidelines. The goal of this project was to provide Ball State-branded Wordpress themes that member of the campus community could use promote services, present research, and provide educational opportunities for students.

Along with the development of the themes, we worked with a small group of faculty members in a round of beta testing. This testing period allowed us to find and fix bugs and add additional features that would be beneficial once the themes were publically released across campus. Additionally, training videos and a write technical support document were create to provide more support to the users.

Role

While I helped design and develop all three Wordpress themes, I acted as lead designer and front-end developer for one of the themes.

I worked on a team to design and develop the first theme and then we broke up into two smaller teams to create the other team. I was the only designer and front-end developer on my small team, so I worked closely with our user experience team member to create a theme that used images as the main visual element while drawing inspiration from different elements on the university’s website.

Back end developers set up the structure of the site and slowly built up the rest of it piece by piece, testing each piece after it was completed. I was able to use the first theme we created as a guide and worked with a developer to create some of the more custom interactions. During this time, I also helped with some of the front-end development for the third theme when needed.

After all the themes were completed, we did a round a beta testing with select faculty members on campus. I worked with 9 clients to teach them how to use Wordpress and our custom themes. I would keep in constant communication to have troubleshoot any issues and did any bug fixes or updates that were found during this time.