By Ahna Heller. The New York Times has described a Webby as “The internet’s highest honor.”
Well, UC Davis won a Webby!
On April 26, the UC Davis homesite—www.ucdavis.edu—was announced the People’s Voice winner in the School/University website category of the Webby Awards, the leading international award “honoring the best of the Internet.”
The UC Davis Information & Educational Technology (IET) and Strategic Communications web teams collaborated closely over the course of a year to develop a digital design system for UC Davis, which was based on the campus rebranding effort from the year before.
The goal was to create an impactful web experience for prospective students during the pandemic. Because the campus was closed, the UC Davis web presence was the main way prospective students were introduced to the campus.
“I’m particularly proud of the collaborative relationship fostered between the StratComm and IET web teams,” said IET architect, Shawn DeArmond. “We built an amazing website during very difficult times, when the web as a communications tool mattered more than ever.”
To that end, the collaborating teams implemented the design system on the campus home site, while concurrently upgrading the site from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 (and eventually Drupal 9) using SiteFarm, a Drupal web publishing platform created and shared by several UC campuses. During the implementation, they also migrated over 20,000 news articles to the new site.
Tristan Peery, director of web communications of UC Davis Strategic Communication, said, “We are so honored and proud to bring the Webby Award to UC Davis. It took an incredible effort of many talented, hard-working people to bring this together. We are very grateful for the recognition of the web industry and the support of the UC Davis community.”
Peery accepted the award on behalf of the university at the May 16, 2022, award ceremony in New York City.
