- Sponsor
- University of Illinois Web Conference Committee
- Contact
- Web Con Committee
- uofiwebcon@illinois.edu
- Originating Calendar
- University of Illinois Web Conference Workshops
Bringing It In House: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Illinois Theme
Workshop description:
Like many units at the University of Illinois, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) wanted a third-party custom website and theme. We thought it would give us greater flexibility to build a pixel-perfect website without needing to hire web developers. Instead, we found many restrictive elements and were frustrated whenever we tried to change something – exactly the things we thought we’d be able to sidestep by opting not to use the Illinois Theme on WordPress. Now that we’ve launched our new site on the Illinois Theme, we've found we have far more freedom and flexibility than the supposedly "custom for us" site our third-party developers provided. Our budgets are much more flexible, anyone on the team can edit the site, and the support from campus is much more robust than the "exclusive" support we were buying from outside agencies. In this workshop, we’ll discuss how the NCSA web team made the changes, which elements we had to eliminate, what we gained, and how our stakeholders are feeling about the new site.Presenters Bios:
Megan Johnson, NCSA
Megan is the science feature writer for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. She’s also a former full-stack developer, and for several months in 2025, she was asked to lead the NCSA Web Services Team as they planned to launch their new site on the Illinois Theme.Robert Slater, Campus Web Services
Robert is a Lead Application Services Specialist at Campus Technology Services and a full-stack developer, unless anyone is asking after him, in which case he definitely isn't and didn't do it. When NCSA was migrating its site, Robert consulted on issues the team encountered to help resolve some of the more unusual problems.