University of Southern Maine

The University of Southern Maine (USM) is the largest campus within the University of Maine System, offering 115 areas of undergraduate and graduate study to 10,000 students. The university is migrating its web presence (a collection of 100+ microsites) to a new content management system, and recognized the opportunity to create a new architecture that would provide a more intuitive user experience.

Working with the project team, we created a streamlined architecture that unites related information from disparate sources, such as course catalogs, academic departments and system-level databases. Supplementary content in the form of multimedia, RSS feeds, and a dashboard of USM social networking activity inform users of the latest happenings throughout the university community. Finally, the modular nature of the architecture enables departments to create sites with relative ease, providing the web team with a standardized approach for growing the university’s web presence.