Fachhochschule Potsdam: Website, Intranet, Web-App, and more
Relaunch or new development of a central website for different user groups: prospective students, the public, companies, research organizations, students and university members. The website is a contact point, comprehensive information portal, online resource and working tool for university members - in some cases with restricted access.
The Fachhochschule Potsdam (FHP) was founded in 1991 and today has around 200 professors and approximately 3,600 students in over 30 degree programs in a range of subjects from information science and engineering to socio-cultural and design disciplines.
The university is particularly committed to promoting social development through the interdisciplinary combination of its range of subjects in the profile lines “Digital Transformation - Urban Future”, “Educating Society” and “Designing, Building and Preserving” in a perspective of study and teaching, research, transfer and further education, both regionally and internationally.
The digital presence of the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam was realized with Drupal 9 based on our own distribution “Brandcoded”. The platform includes the public website, closed areas (which are understood as an intranet) and, in addition to many interfaces to other systems, a course catalog that can be found on the website and is also available to students as a mobile web app.
In addition to the website, the digital signage system on the university campus is also maintained via the content management system.
In addition to modernizing the digital presence, the aim of the relaunch was to merge the website and intranet, connect various tools and systems and implement review and approval processes for quality assurance. Last but not least, Typo3 was to be replaced as the content management system.
In order to meet the diverse, sometimes competing requirements of the university's various institutions, extensive content analyses were carried out in advance, taking into account the existing content of the Typo3 system, but focusing in particular on user expectations and media-compatible preparation according to today's standards.
In order to meet the content requirements and to achieve a high degree of flexibility in the maintenance of the website, a comprehensive set of content modules (paragraphs) was developed, which enable both simple content maintenance and the retrieval of different content filterable according to central taxonomies. In this way, we take into account the idea of interdisciplinary links in the sense of the university's profile lines and offer a high degree of convenience in maintaining the content.
Despite the sometimes complex and extensive content (currently over 9,000 nodes), quality control with regard to fast loading times and the continuous improvement of the user experience - including on mobile devices - was the focus of development. The use of responsive image styles, optimized image compression and loading speed as well as lean code are therefore a matter of course. The aim was and is not only to pass the Core Web Vitals evaluation of the pages, but also to achieve the highest possible score. A goal that can only be achieved through continuous improvement and optimization.
