Imagine serving a community of thousands – students, faculty, staff – in a decentralized university setting. How can a web development team meet the ongoing website needs of hundreds of academic and administrative units across campus? Traditionally, a web agency might approach each department as a distinct project. However, Stanford Web Services has been uniquely positioned to come up with more robust and repeatable solutions, tailored to the specific needs of our community at Stanford.

Over the past two years, Stanford Web Services has built dozens of websites for academic and administrative departments at Stanford University using Drupal. We started with full discovery, design, and development phases, but realized we could serve more people faster by building reusable solutions using Agile project management and iterative design thinking.
Instead of custom site designs, we create modular Features and install profiles. Instead of endless discovery, we do our research and make smart assumptions. We prefer building reusable tools over bespoke solutions. And our partners are on board with our vision to build systems that benefit all of campus.

This case study will detail the successes, failures, false starts, process improvements, and decisions that have led to several foundational products that we use to serve a broad base of use cases at Stanford:

• Stanford Sites Jumpstart - a pre-packaged website solution for small labs and groups
• Stanford Sites Jumpstart Academic - a robust, full-featured website solution for larger academic departments
• Stanford Sites Personal - a one-click solution for personal websites
• Open Framework - a flexible base theme that provides a simple yet powerful way to create complex responsive layouts