Dear Science Community,
Today, we are writing to share what we hope will be positive news for our division: ITS has changed its plans for the UC Santa Cruz web rebuild and will now be using WordPress as their main platform instead of Drupal. This will bring the campus project more in line with our division’s web project, which is already rolling out on WordPress.
As many of you know, our division made the decision to move our websites to WordPress several years ago based on our evaluation of its ease-of-use. We know that the campus decision to move to Drupal caused some concern among our web users that they would have to learn two new systems, so we expect that this new decision to shift to WordPress will be welcome news.
The campus decision was based on user-testing across campus, which found what we anticipated in our 2018 decision, that the new Drupal sites were difficult to use. The campus is now recommending WordPress because it is easier to learn, especially for less-technical and infrequent users, and meets the vast majority of the university’s web content use cases. We are happy that the campus is taking user experience seriously and are hopeful that this change will benefit the entire university.
Best,
Paul Koch
Distinguished Professor, Earth & Planetary Sciences
Dean, Division of Physical & Biological Sciences
Rose Miyatsu
Asst. Dir. of Marketing Communications,
Division of Physical & Biological Sciences