How do you communicate effectively with university staff and students?

For the management and maintenance of the websites, the switch was made to the Drupal CMS, because of its innovative possibilities and high level of user-friendliness. The popular open source platform is used by 71 of the top 100 universities worldwide. Most important for Tilburg University is the flexibility of the new CMS; employees must be able to do a lot themselves, and not be stuck to a pattern.

The content of the old system has been migrated to the Drupal CMS after a thorough revision process. Only necessary information has been published. Especially for a large website such as Tilburg University, it is important that texts are concise.

In the user-friendly Drupal CMS, users work with several Paragraphs. These are predefined content blocks for, for example, text, video, image or training. The editor can easily build the page by adding the desired paragraphs. An additional advantage is that you are not stuck to a limited set of templates for pages, but the pages are flexible.

The website was originally built in Drupal 8; the latest version of Drupal at the time of development. Because support for Drupal 8 ends in November 2021, we upgraded the website to Drupal 9 in 2020. In addition, the upgrade has a positive effect on the performance and security of the website.

Because English is also an important language for Tilburg University, we delivered a bilingual website. And built an intranet for the university's employees and created links to the student portal. With SSO (single sign-on), users only have to log in in one place, after which they automatically have access to other platforms in the network.

To increase engagement with website visitors and gain more insight into the user experience, Tilburg University can add feedback forms and a rating system to pages.