Sector(s)
The American School of Dubai is an independent, not-for-profit, US curriculum, PreK-12 international school that provides learning experiences designed to promote the maximum potential of its students.
ASD has ambitions to create the ideal modern digital learning experience for their students and as such, they partnered with Vardot to build their new website on Drupal 8.
Vardot began the project by analyzing all ASD’s needs and priorities via an on-site workshop in Dubai, UAE.
About the project
Dynamic Experiences
The American School of Dubai was looking for rich user experience with an updated responsive design, theming, user-friendly navigation and clear site structure.
The new ASD website is meant to feature a robust news/story manager that can filter by themes and categories and include voices of various constituents.
The ASD Website has a primary goal to appeal to and provide information to its audience members. The main audience members will have dedicated landing pages to provide them with a hub of information in one place.
To deliver a more personalized experience; the new ASD website will have multiple landing pages with dynamic content tailored to each different user profile identified by ASD and Vardot:
- Students: resources for currently enrolled students
- Faculty and Staff: resources for faculty and staff members
- Parents: resources for potential parents and parents of currently enrolled students
- Alumni: resources for alumni to stay connected
- Prospective Students and Their Families: resources to showcase how is like to study at The American School of Dubai
Customized Editorial and Content Publishing Workflow
The Drupal 8 website was built on top of Varbase CMS - which gives them the ability to publish multilingual content for a diverse range of website visitors and more importantly their target audience of the aforementioned users.
Publishing content using Varbase allowed them to enjoy a seamless content publishing and moderation process with tiered roles and permissions for different levels of access (i.e.) admin, editor, publisher, and viewer.
Based on the identified and agreed upon roles - a preconfigured revision control process was automated for all content types and entities.
Back to topScalability and Growth
ASD wanted the ability to explore their opportunities for scaling and growth in the future. We built the new website with full scalability and flexibility for any new features, and other potential additions that ASD may wish or need to add in the future.
An example of such opportunities being considered seriously by ASD is the plan to launch multiple microsites.
Microsites can enable ASD to create unique digital platforms and websites for particular programs. Initiatives and target audiences without the need for much technical expertise and at a lower cost than building new websites that require different configuration and support.
These microsites will share the same consistent branding, theming, security and content publishing process provided by a centralized CMS.
Download Multisite Solutions Architecture Comparison Guide
Back to topSecure and Powerful Search
ASD stressed the importance of having a clear structure for the new website as it will help ensure that their website visitors can find and navigate the site much easier. The new website features an index or directory for all ASD staff and faculty which needed to be easily accessible, searchable and secure.
Vardot launched the website SSL enabled and continues to monitor the status of security to implement any required upgrades.
ASD’s new website features a sitewide search engine with advanced search capabilities thanks to the implementation of the Apache Solr search system.
A full and extensive On-Site SEO performance checklist tool was featured to enable them to create landing pages optimized for search engines.
Back to topPowerful and Sustained Performance
The CMS of choice needed to be robust enough to sustain uninterrupted high performance at all times. Drupal websites are renowned for their superior focus on delivering high performance and superior user experience. ASD is aiming to create a digital experience rich with multimedia content with a heavy focus on video in particular so effective media management was essential.
Also, ASD required a robust CMS that can handle traffic and numerous key integrations without compromising the quality of user experience and negatively impacting page loading speed for website browsers.
Key integrations required by ASD included: Google for Education and Subscriptions syncing to MailChimp. Google for Education integration was required to enable Single Sign-On (SSO).
Back to topSupport and Enablement
As mentioned earlier, a key factor in any sustained success and digital growth is incremental delivery.
In addition to online and onsite training workshops, Vardot will provide ASD with key maintenance and growth support activities that include but not limited to UX feature upgrades, security updates, performance monitoring, and reporting.
Using automated migration; Vardot safely migrated all eligible content from their legacy website and provided support in the form of manual content entry as well.
Back to topWhy Drupal was chosen
- Rich and dynamic user experience
- Superior website performance
- Advanced search features
- Seamless and structured content publishing workflow
- Key integrations
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
General Data Protection Regulation
This module aims to help site admins follow the guidelines and legislation set by the EU.
EU Cookie Compliance (GDPR Compliance)
This module addresses the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that came into effect on 25th May 2018, and the EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications from 2012. It provides a GDPR cookie banner where you can gather consent from the user when the website stores cookies on their computer or otherwise handles their personal information.
Charts Field Formatter
The Charts field formatter module provides a way to build any kind of chart inside an entity (e.g. node, paragraph ..etc) with Highcharts charts provider.
As any chart data depends on tabular data, this module depends on the TableField module which will let you import your chart data using a CSV file or manual editing.
Issuu viewer
It allows you to render embedded Issuu viewers. Issuu viewer creates a simple field type that allows you to render embedded Issuu viewers on the site by entering the document id.
Popup On Load
The module allows displaying a popup once after a certain delay on a page load. This fills a gap in popup modules family (Popups, Popup), which are designed to show popups only after a click on an HTML element or to implement a complex behavior like modal dialog forms.
Protected Pages
Protected Pages modules allows the administrator to secure any page in your website by a password. You just need to go to configuration page of this module and add path, password. After that the added path will be password protected. This module also allows you to send the details of this protected page to multiple users by email.
Varbase: The Ultimate Drupal 8 CMS Starter Kit (Bootstrap Ready)
Varbase is an enhanced Drupal distribution packed with adaptive functionalities and essential modules, that speed up your development, and provides you with standardized configurations, making your life easier. The essence of Varbase lies within the basic concept that initiated it; DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself). Varbase handles that for you, relieving you from repeating all the modules, features, configurations that are included in every Drupal project.
