Multi-Site Mania: A Modular Strategy for Creating (and Maintaining) Consistency Across Platforms
Managing a consistent web presence across multiple platforms, technologies, and departments is hard. Once you reach a certain volume, even basic updates between all of your sites becomes a big task, and maintaining a cohesive look/feel and branding can seem out of reach.
In this workshop, I’ll share our strategy for multi-site management at BU Libraries and introduce the technologies that have helped us to significantly decrease our sites’ maintenance and development costs while greatly improving their usability and branding.
Working on an example “library” on four main “sites”, we’ll use Web Components, Javascript modules, and NPM to drastically simplify, track, automate, and extend their administration. By breaking the webpage into pieces, we’ll take greater ownership of our content, moving it out of each proprietary silo and into an environment with greater reliability and control.
By the end of the workshop, we’ll have created several static, dynamic, and interactive widgets and deployed them to each of our sites. Circling back, we’ll contrast our new modular approach with what we started with - comparing the time and effort it takes to achieve a similar (or even better) results by each method. Time willing, we’ll discuss alternative strategies and complications.
