Today we sit down with Mark Roller, founding partner at Ascedia to discuss the building and launch of UW Madison’s Institute for Clinical and Translational Research's new WordPress website.
Mark, talk about ICTR and what they do.
ICTR stands for the Institute for Clinical and Translational Research. ICTR helps researchers with their research projects. Whether that's establishing funding, providing supplemental research, or getting them into specific programs to help them along at whatever research stage they are at.And what work did we do for ICTR?
We did a full website redesign. We also helped them rethink their content strategy and key features. Now, we're getting into running web analytics for them. I’ll talk more about that later.Mark, what was wrong with the old site, and what were they looking to do with the new site?
The previous ICTR website was built by different teams over time - for quite different needs and purposes. It had quite a bit of content packed into unmanageable formats, so it didn't have an effective way for users to search, filter, or compare that content.
Additionally, ICTR didn’t have a cohesive look that aligned with UW Madison's direction. They knew they wanted to be more visual, but they weren't sure how they wanted to add lifestyle and visual interest. Finally, they had a lot of dead content they didn't want to support or migrate. So, the time was right to redo it all from scratch.
Talk about the work.
The new ICTR website has a smaller footprint and it’s more consistent throughout. With the old site, the team would create a page, put some content on it, and call it a day. Consistency from page to page and program to program was not there.
On the new site, content is segmented into post types like programs, funding, and services. That content is presented in a consistent structure and bidirectionally linked. With this shift, they need fewer pages.
This approach made filtering advanced fields and comparing content possible - where you couldn’t before.
Now, for example, it’s easy for visitors to compare specific funding deadlines and requirements. So, it went from a lot of content down to a fraction of it, but it's more meaningful content now and more targeted and focused.
I want to mention, that along with all this content and feature development came training. We trained their team to not only maintain the new website and features, but to also act as trainers to others within ICTR.
Their site was in WordPress, right?
Yes. WordPress with a custom theme and some advanced customizations.
What were some of the highlights of working on this project?
Probably the biggest is we went from doing basic blocks to building out a website with more advanced blocks and functionality. When I built the site, I focused on making fewer blocks, but the blocks I did design were more intelligent and able to do a lot more.
The design behind these intelligence blocks went to another level. The client can use those blocks from scratch to create new pages and sections, copy existing blocks, or even use global blocks. The great thing about the blocks is that they’re tested and reliable, so the editor doesn’t have to worry about the look – they can instead focus on creating great content.
We also started working with SearchWP, which is a more enhanced WordPress search tool. This allowed for things the client wanted like search auto-complete, the ability to influence search results, create synonyms for content, and boost content results and downplay others. Really all the things you would want from an enterprise-class search system. And we built all of that for them.
I want to go back to the smart blocks you created. Are we able to use these blocks for other clients?
Yes we are, and it’s one of the ways we can work better and faster. All these smart blocks add to our library of tools. The more tools we have, the faster the output for the client. One of the comparison blocks came directly from UW-Engineering. It needed some modification, but that sped up development time for its use on ICTR.
Mark, this sounded like a great project to work on. What made it so good?
It was a great project! What really helped was communication and the cadence of meetings with the client.
In the beginning, the client had some concerns about how the process would work and how they would keep all their stakeholders involved and up to date.
To help, we participated in several key internal calls to talk through any issues they had and through this participation we were able to not be looked at as just another web developer agency – but more of a partner throughout the experience.
In addition, we had weekly meetings to keep everyone on track. That weekly meeting was just a half hour every week, but I feel like it significantly helped.
Another factor was using Basecamp – our project management tool. Once the ICTR team got familiar with Basecamp, they knew what was coming and they knew what we owed them and what they owed us.
I want to talk about the roles of both organizations. Ascedia worked as the digital strategist and web developer. What role did ICTR play in the project?
There were three core ICTR team members and they were the interface to the inside of the organization. They represented the different needs throughout the organization, and they carried the message to all the stakeholders. This was critical because it reduced the number of cooks in the kitchen and helped keep things moving forward.
The site is built and launched. What’s next?
There are a few things; for one, setting up gated content for the client. We will likely be doing some in-depth comparisons for different programs. Then, there’s reporting for the different groups and setting up Google Looker analytics dashboards for the ICTR team.
Reporting requires its own discussion and strategy because before we set up reporting, we first want to know what the client wants to measure and how they are going to define success. Next, we want to discuss what's possible to measure and what people should know. Then, we align our work to this. So I will be helping them with all of that.
