ASU UTO, Apps & Design

Apps & Design is one of several development departments within UTO. The group is primarily responsible for building and maintaining systems realted to the deployment of organizational websites within the University.

This includes the development of "Webspark", a Drupal distribution built and styled to meet ASU Web Standards, as well as the creation of various Drupal modules to meet the requirements of colleges and organizations across the university.

The group assists said organizations with the deployment and maintenance of Webspark sites on the hosting platform Pantheon.

The first project I was given ownership of was the ASU RFI module, which was supposed to be a plug & play solution for new college sites to set up a "Request for Information" form on any page of their Drupal site so that prospective students could get additional information on college degrees.

This project required me to work with various organizations across the university including the Marketing Hub, EOSS & Ops to deliver a product that would assist in onboarding new students.

In order to be Web Standards compliant, every site must include the ASU Global Header & Footer at the top and bottom of every web page respectively.

The footer is a straightforward piece of HTML that houses ASU's Innovation badge along with various links to important information.

The header includes important links just like the footer, however it also houses an ASU Search bar (powered by Google) that allows users to search for information both at the site being viewed or across all college sites simultaneously.It also acts as an integral part for various systems that need to be deployed across all university sites.

For example, it is an important piece in the University's Single Sign-on solution which allows students to maintain their authenticated status when browsing through various University sites back-to-back. SSO greatly improves the user experience and deploying it through the header has proven to be an extremely effective solution.

The Header is also an important piece in the University's analytics solution. It acts as a vector to deploy ASU's Google Tag Manager code, so the Marketing Hub can collect important information on what drives engagement with ASU's web presence as well as how to best interact with users.

There are hundreds of organizations across the University and only a few of them have employees that are familiar with sitebuilding. For that reason the Apps & Design team's main job is to assist in rolling out an maintaining sites for those organizations.

During my time on the team I assisted several organizations including the Marketing Hub, EOSS and The Office of the President with various aspects of their Drupal sites.