Greetings CLAS DEOs and administrators,

On behalf of the CLAS Web Services team I wanted to give you an update on our most recent efforts and priorities.

As you know, over the past year plus, the CLAS Web Services team has been working with many of you to upgrade our CLAS departmental websites to the newest Drupal architecture and we’re making good progress--as of now we have about 60% of all our department sites updated, and we’re working through the remaining sites as swiftly as we can. 

As we implement the update, we’re acknowledging the emerged primacy of our web experience in student recruitment and are partnering with our marketing and communications colleagues to better optimize our websites for prospective students while still serving our other audiences and needs.  While we make these investments, we’re continuing to do our best to be responsive to various requests that come in for help with your websites.

As we support CLAS sites from a systemic perspective, small change requests can often result in large commitments of time and effort, so we’re prioritizing requests based on results having the most impact. As new functionalities become available, we’ll do our best to leverage features that can benefit CLAS websites, while keeping front and center our primary goal of getting your sites updated, built, and optimized.

If you’ve already moved to SiteNow v3 (Drupal 7 to Drupal 9), you may be eager to make other improvements or changes to the site. Those needs and wishes are good to hold on to so we can consider them as soon as we’re able, but our resources will need to be focused on completing the migration and implementing student recruitment focused elements. If you are still awaiting your site upgrade, you can prepare by auditing your site’s pages and content to better prepare for the site upgrade.

The CLAS web presence has been and will always be a living work in progress.  Regardless of where you are in your evolution, investment in reviewing and updating content will pay off for your communication and marketing efforts in the future.  We appreciate your collaboration and patience!

We will follow up again as we make progress, but in the meanwhile, here’s how to contact us for questions: clas-web-services@uiowa.edu.