Today we launched a gorgeous new home page at WSU. For the most part everything went as planned and definitely without catastrophe. We’ll have a full stack write-up at some point soon on web.wsu.edu with more details (still a few more things to launch), but I’ve had a few thoughts throughout the day that I wanted to note.
We’re HTTPS only. And that’s pretty freaking cool. It was a year ago today that we flipped the switch on WSU News to SPDY and ever since then I couldn’t wait to get the root domain. I had anticipated some push-back, though I don’t know why, and we haven’t heard a peep. I plan on running a script through a massive list of public university websites to see how many do this. Many don’t even support TLS on the home page, let alone force it.
Our root domain is on WordPress. Typing that address in for the first time today after everything went live felt really, really cool. I don’t think that feeling is going to wear off. Even though this is site ~600 to launch on our platform, it’s a huge statement that the University is behind us on this. I don’t remember all of our conversations, but I don’t think that having the root on WordPress was really on our radar for the first 2 years. Dig it.
We’re pretty damn fast. That’s become a lot easier these days. But we have a lot of content on the home page—and a really big map—and we still serve the document to the browser super quickly. I actually screwed up pretty big here by microcaching with Nginx at the last minute. It made things even faster, but cached a bad redirect for quite a while. Lessons learned, and we’ll keep tweaking—especially with image optimization, but I love that we went out the gate with such a good looking waterfall.
And! The WSU Home WordPress theme is GPL https://t.co/RfEXsZLECF
— Jeremy Felt (@jeremyfelt) March 24, 2015
And as I stormed earlier in my series of “I heart GPL” tweets, every part of our central web is open source. We publish our server provisioning, our WordPress multi-network setup, our brand framework, our themes, and our plugins. 134 repositories and counting. Not everything is pretty enough or documented enough, and will often serve more as an example than as a product. But, everything is out there and we’re sharing and doing our best to talk about it more.
Lots of this makes me happy. More to come! 🙂
Responses and reactions
Mentions
Replies
Woot! Kudos on a great launch. May what WSU embraced be emulated at other educational institutions!
Hey Jeremy,
Massive congrats to you and the web team there. The new flagship looks stunning and as you mentioned it's super fast! Props as per usual for open sourcing the theme!
Keep up the amazing work at WSU :)
:thumbsup:
Awesome! The site looks great. The mobile site is wonderful! But open source throughout is truly spectacular. This is a great example to other universities.
The only requirement for your mention to be recognized is a link to this post in your post's content. You can update or delete your post and then re-submit the URL in the form to update or remove your response from this page.
Learn more about Webmentions.