Q&A: Boston University’s Enterprise Web Ecosystem

Key Insights:

• Boston University uses a centralized, product-based WordPress system that scales design and functionality across hundreds of decentralized sites while maintaining brand consistency.
• A tiered service model balances autonomy and strategy, offering both turnkey solutions and paid, custom-designed sites based on institutional priorities.
• Cross-functional governance and modular design tools empower scalability, enabling non-technical users to manage content while the web team focuses on high-impact strategic initiatives.

Tell me about Boston University’s web platforms. What is your overall approach to web publishing and management?

There are two pieces to it. There’s the front-facing, end-user piece and then there’s the underpinnings of all that. The underneath system is how we have a platform that is scalable that can support all those sites.

We’re decentralized on the user-facing front. With our system, we’re able to tailor the messaging and the design for a school, and make it more relevant to that audience. We do all that while still having all the sites ladder up to the overarching BU brand.

Underneath the hood, that’s all powered by Wordpress. In our environment, we have a multi-network, multisite Wordpress environment. We have a responsive framework and then all of our school and college websites are a child theme of that framework. They inherit the base design of that framework and we build on top of it.

Approaching the Web as a Product
Recently, one of the things that we’ve shifted into more is the notion of centralizing a lot of the functionality and creating a product offering. So instead of building a faculty filtering tool on each and every website, we build a plugin that we can use on every website. That way, when that plugin gets updated, it propagates throughout the network of sites.

Team Structure & Product Ownership
My team, Interactive Design, works in partnership with another unit at the university, Information Services & Technology (IS&T). We co-own the environment and Wordpress. We provide the front-facing framework, design, and UX expertise, and IS&T generally provides more of the backend and infrastructure experience and support.

What’s challenging for us is we don’t have a dedicated product team, so we have to balance that work with what we call our client work – websites for the schools and colleges that make up the university. We have to prioritize those, obviously, because they have recruitment targets, positioning needs, messaging needs, updates that are needed to the design.

All along the way, we’re trying to improve iteratively things like accessibility on a technical front, SEO, analytics, in addition to improving the design, updating the user experience, and also trying to balance that with modernizing the platform – updating what’s under the hood.

Boston University offers different levels of Wordpress service on multiple domains: www.bu.edu, sites.bu.edu, and blogs.bu.edu. How long have you been doing that and how did you arrive at this approach?

We've had a similar approach for as long as I've been here. Blogs.bu.edu is there for anyone to use. Sites.bu.edu is mostly used by student groups or faculty who use those sites for themselves. The www.bu.edu domain is primarily used for our main, outward-facing, more public communications – the schools and colleges, the university itself, the BU homepage, any of the administrative or academic units, research centers, things like that.

How it works is, the university has a service offering where any [school, center, institute, or academic or administrative department] can get a website [on the www.bu.edu domain]. You don’t have to use the Interactive Design team to custom-design you a website. It has a base design. It doesn’t have a lot of the functionality that we are able to give them when we design a website for them. A lot of the tools and plugins we have available for them aren’t available for those DIY, turnkey sites.

Strategy as a Foundation
We generally discourage any of the more strategic initiatives of the university from using the DIY solution because they usually require a higher design touch, but more importantly, they sit on a digital strategy.

We’ll create a digital strategy for each of our clients that come to us. Coming out of the strategy, they’ll get recommendations. What do our users want? What are they looking for? What are the business objectives that we want to hit? What are the strategic goals for the website? We bring those things together and form recommendations. Those recommendations inform a sitemap, which informs the wireframes, which inform the design. You won’t get those steps with the DIY option.

Evolving the Product Approach
One of the things I’ve been wanting to do, in partnership with the IS&T team, is bolster that design offering at the default, DIY level and streamline our service offering to be a bit more productized so we can turn sites around more quickly but also elevate the design.

Moving to the block editor is going to enhance that because it is going to afford clients a lot more flexibility and a lot more functionality once we start to roll out more of those tools. That will also allow my team to focus more on the higher, more strategic initiatives for the university while having a more solid core foundation for the ones that maybe just need a simple web presence.

For those sites where you do more customization and strategy work, do your client units pay for that service?

Yes, we’re recoverable. It’s all internal money, it all stays inside the university, but we are recoverable. If a college at BU wants a new website, they pay us to do that website. Whereas if they want a turnkey site, they don’t pay for that service.

Built-In Flexibility to Meet Client Needs
Many times, people want more autonomy than we can really give them. For all the pros of a managed environment, that’s probably one of the cons when looked at from the client lens.

With this in mind, one of our goals is how do we give clients flexibility so they don’t need back-end developers to check off the items on that wishlist?

If we can build enough flexibility into the site, they can just focus on the content, and not worry about how to get the content where they need it. That’s how we shifted a lot of our thinking about design. How can we componentize it, make it more modular, and offer the maximum amount of flexibility?

What is the value of your current technical approach? How does the institution benefit from the way you have things set up now?

Under the hood is really where the shared infrastructure lives. To take that and make it flexible enough so that we can individualize schools and colleges is a real benefit. The “small school in a big university” approach allows us to individualize the key messaging points for each school or college. The College of Fine Arts is going to have very different messaging needs and strategy from the College of Engineering. Our approach allows us to really tailor that experience.

Flexibility under a Unified Brand
The schools may also organize their content a bit differently. For example, some schools may organize academics by program and others may organize by degree type. It might not work to shoehorn everybody into the same way. Having that flexibility allows us to tailor content needs in a more individualized way. We can take all that messaging, positioning, and unique voice and successfully ladder it up to the overarching brand and overarching messaging that that brand portrays and have everything work in concert. That is really the ultimate goal with it.

A Measure of Autonomy
But I do think it’s a big win for us, too. Structurally, it also gives everybody their own little room in the house that they can decorate as they want. This room can feel completely different from that room, but they’re all part of the same house. I think that level of autonomy at the school level is good because the schools all function sort of on their own. This way helps support that.

What’s something that you’ve done in the last couple of years that you feel has had the biggest impact?

There have been a couple of major initiatives for the university. One is the data sciences center (the building) and data sciences itself for the university. Coming together with a suite of materials for data sciences programs, not only for the website but working in coordination with the print design group and bringing all those pieces together, working collaboratively. I’m really proud of that piece because it shows a nice, unified front for a major initiative for the university.

The Web as a System
We think about structuring the department and how we are using the technology and tools to help us do our work more quickly and less expensively. That’s been a major shift. We used to do each website as a unique, standalone project. Now we’re really thinking about the bigger picture. It’s been a real change in our mindset.

Now, with each request we get from a client, we evaluate it and say, “Will that be better served in a more broad way across the university? Will other people benefit from it, too? Or is it just unique to them?”

If you were going to start over, is there anything you would do differently?

Two things – I would start instantly with this idea of how to centralize the functionality and have a dedicated team solely focused on that. For a large institution, I think it is a huge win when you can bring together the marketing/design expertise with the technical backend expertise and marry those two disciplines and have them work in concert together.

Second, I would also focus on branding and what types of tools we use that would centralize communication platforms more. Everyone sends out emails and the branding gets broken depending on how they are sending out emails. Over time, you start to see what a pain point that is. When I started here, I was a designer and I just wanted to make cool things, and we did… If I had known then what I know now, I probably would have thought about things a lot differently.

I would start thinking about the bigger picture sooner – on the technology centralization front, on the branding front, and even on the messaging front and the way we are going about that messaging. What types of things are we putting out in the world? How are we using our storytelling? All these things I learned over the years that I wish I’d known then.

At a Glance: Boston University Enterprise Web Ecosystem