Georgia High School Association Goes Mobile with Drupal 7 Upgrade

Drupal sites have a life cycle. Module support shifts from one version of Drupal to the next. New solutions are identified, and old solutions are refined.

For GHSA.net, updating to D7 meant improving mobile support and implementing a cleaner, more regular presentation, and simplifying content management workflows.

This is a discussion of techniques used throughout the project, challenges, and lessons learned.

Problem

Due to the increasing prevalence of mobile devices, improved mobile support was needed to ensure users and stakeholders could have the best access to content, regardless of device. Also, to help keep content aligned with the current season, GHSA needed to streamline the content management. 

Goals

• Improved mobile support
• Clearer, less cluttered design
• Simplified content management

Solutions

Improved Mobile Support—During the discovery phase, mobile support was identified as the primary motivation for the upgrade. GHSA wanted a site that looked good on desktop browsers as well as tablets and mobile, so their stakeholders and users could access content readily.

During the design phase, we iterated on a series of wireframes for desktop, tablet, and mobile. Since space for mobile devices is at a premium, we identified several low-priority blocks to hide on mobile, keeping the presentation uncluttered.

Clearer, less cluttered design—Tabbed blocks and strong lines separating blocks, as well as subtly placed ad content, helped to feature important content without overloading users.

Simplified content management—Notequeues and taxonomy-based menu display as well as content filtering helped to simplify content management.

Key Modules Used

• Flex Slider—Responsive Image rotator
• MegaMenu—Multi-column drop-downs
• IMCE—File asset management.
• Nodequeue and Flag-based Views—Simplified content management, while maintaining granular control of featured content.
• QuickTabs—Allows two tabs in place of one for better use of vertical space, without too much clutter.
• Block footer WYSIWYG field—Custom solution to allow placement and management of unobtrusive block footer ads.

Summary

By implementing a cleaner, responsive design and by leveraging content management best practices as well as excellent contributed tools, a more accessible and easier to manage site was produced. Although there were some coordinative, non-technical challenges that impacted the timeline, the D7 site launched successfully with GHSA receiving a lot of positive feedback 

Additional Resources