Drupal for university websites: obvious benefits, beautiful examples

There are plenty of awesome websites built with Drupal in all industries. However, one of these industries deserves to be called “Drupal territory.” Over 70 percent of top higher education websites are built with Drupal. It seems like Drupal permanently lives on their campus as a special guest of honor. Why — are there some secrets that they know? Let’s discover the reasons that universities love Drupal so much, as well as enjoy some vivid examples of higher education sites built with Drupal.

Drupal’s benefits for higher education websites

• A site for every department? Easy!

Universities often have plenty of departments and branches. Drupal’s multisite feature makes it possible to have as many sites as you wish on the same Drupal installation. This saves time and costs on site development and administration, while giving self-sufficiency and autonomy to every unit. Content can be easily shared between multiple sites. In addition, universities appreciate intranet solutions, which are easy to implement with Drupal.

• Flexible permissions

Professors, students, alumni, administrators, visitors, and many others university website users need to have different levels of access to avoid  total chaos. Luckily, Drupal offers a very flexible system of roles, letting you create user roles and assign permissions to them. They will cover even the smallest detail of working with the site.

• Multiple languages

With international students and branches in different countries, universities take full advantage of Drupal’s powerful multilingual features. These features are especially impressive in Drupal 8, with 4 multilingual modules in core to translate everything — from interface to content. It offers a great choice of over a hundred languages to install on websites. Some awesome volunteer work has been done to make Drupal’s interface available in each of these languages.

• Workflow management 

Drupal has awesome Workflow modules that make content publication and other processes easy to manage in detail.

• Easy content creation and editing 

Drupal offers handy ways to create and edit content, which are available to people with no technical background. Drupal 8 has gone a step further in content editing features by introducing on-the-fly editing, better image management, media handling, and much more.

• Multiple categories

Universities often need to categorize content in various ways to make a website handy to use, and Drupal’s taxonomy features are great for that.

• Great display on mobile phones

Many students or potential students, as well as staff, browse university websites from a mobile phone. Drupal will make sites look good on any devices. This is especially true for the latest version, Drupal 8, which has a mobile-first approach. All base themes are responsive out-of-box, and there are modules in the core that allow you to make any theme perfectly responsive.

• Ability to extend

Higher education establishments grow quickly, and their Drupal sites can easily follow them in this growth due to Drupal’s scalability.

• Information security

University websites usually store sensitive information. Luckily, Drupal is one of the toughest nuts for hackers to crack when it comes to website safety. This is due to regular security updates, a watchful community, strict checks for contributed modules, and more.

• Community support

Universities love Drupal, and the Drupal community loves university websites just as much, offering support groups, as well as multiple free modules and distributions.

Great examples of university websites built with Drupal

And now it’s time for examples of beautiful, feature-rich, powerful university websites built with Drupal.

Maryland Global University (a website created by our team!)

 

University of Oxford

 

University of Colorado

 

University of Minnesota

 

Oregon State University

 

Stanford Graduate School of Business

 

Rutgers University

 

The George Washington University

 

Brown University

 

University of Calgary

Wrap-up

These are just a few benefits and examples of the beautiful tandem between Drupal and university websites. If you are interested in getting one created for you, or adding top-notch features to your existing one, contact us and your wish will be quickly fulfilled by WishDesk team!

+ Bonus: Infographic