Community Spotlight: Yale West Campus

Home to innovative research institutes and core technology labs, along with a sizable Conference Conference and dining facilities, Yale’s West Campus has the challenging job of presenting information on a range of academic topics and to numerous partners. Through the new YaleSites platform, the West Campus team of Jon Atherton and Kelly Locke were able to easily accomplish their content and website goals. 

According to Jon, Associate Director of Communications at West Campus, the new platform enabled the team to show West Campus’s different units in sustainable and dynamic ways.  

Now well established, the West Campus research institutes have individualized pages that properly highlight their growth and exciting work. To meet ambitious content goals, the team made use of a variety of blocks, including Spotlight, Views, and Quick Links. These versatile blocks allowed the team to showcase each institute’s labs and people, feature relevant news and events, and display related links, such as connected departments. In addition, thanks to the new platform’s design system, institutes pages are visually cohesive despite varying content goals.

The team also took the opportunity to transform their homepage, which now welcomes visitors with a Grand Hero block featuring clips of West Campus’s unique landscape. Combined with a concise call to action that links to their Visit page, this block represents a convincing invitation to learn more about the campus.

In other areas of the website, the Custom Cards block was a favorite, used by the West Campus team to draw attention to the campus’s main features, as an introduction to their seven research institutes, and to list a number of services. Keeping with the theme of making visitor navigation simple, the team included stacked Spotlight Landscape blocks, resulting in both an interesting layout and effortless access to relevant pages. 

“The ITS team was the most valuable resource in this project,” commented Jon Atherton. “The ability for us to work in real time with the ITS team helped create a better product more quickly, but it also had the benefit of providing an ongoing source of learning in the new YaleSites environment.” The team also found YaleSites’ written resources and email updates helpful when building the site. 

Visit the West Campus site to see the variety of ways visual elements can be incorporated on the YaleSites platform.