Replatforming a website isn’t just about technology— it’s about sustaining an organisation’s brand voice through this massive change. At the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, we embraced bold decisions to sustain our brand voice. We selected an innovative higher-ed focussed platform based in Ireland and partnered with a fantastic young design firm out of Newcastle in the UK to bring our globally focussed, design-first school to the world’s biggest stage. As the DNS rolled across the globe in the early morning of July 9th, 2024, we knew our bold decision was the right one.
This session will explore how the design choices permeated everything we did on the platform. From overcoming concerns from faculty and leadership about the boldness of the experience design to finding ways to simplify complex problems, we did not waiver from the design vision. For content owners, we prioritised governance through smart constraints rather than heavy-handed rules, sustaining a distributed authorship model while safeguarding accessibility and SEO. We found ways to duplicate, mirror and reuse content through data feeds to reduce workload. Bringing in new areas post go-live, we are leveraging scalable content models so that the site can become one platform for all Rotman web properties. In so doing, we’ve created a website that not only serves today’s needs but evolves effortlessly into the future.
Main Points:
- Integration with social & marketing tools: How built-in automation enhances engagement and extends reach.
- Staying true to your brand: How a bold web strategy reinvigorated the Rotman team and kept momentum going.
- Smart governance for decentralized authors: How we balance creative freedom with accessibility, usability, and brand consistency.
- Scalability and sustainability: Reducing workload with mirrored content, intuitive CMS design, and cloud hosting.
- Leveraging a global talent pool: The benefits of working with a fully remote, international team.
Pym Buitenhuis
Director of Marketing, University of Toronto
Pym Buitenhuis is the Director of Marketing at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. A seasoned marketing and communications professional, Pym began her career in museums, completing her Masters of Museum Studies at the U of T. She went on to assume increasingly senior roles at Telus, BMO Financial Group and at Indigo before joining U of T in 2010.
With responsibility for brand-related assets for promoting Rotman globally, Pym and her team manage brochure and print production, developing digital advertising, maintaining and evolving the school’s website, all graphic design including the visual identity, video production, photography and on-going work. on the main social channels. We are a busy and extremely creative group. We not only bring visibility for the school in order to recruit prospective graduate students, we also promote Rotman’s faculty thought content which is focused on the on bringing insights of value for both business and society.
The Rotman website CMS replatforming and site redesign was a project that began in 2022 through an extensive global procurement process where Terminalfour, a firm from Ireland, was selected along with a UK based web design company named Bloom. Both were exceptionally strong vendors. We believe we could not have made a better choice. By late 2023, we began organizing over 50 people across the school to re-structure, and be trained, to migrate their content to the platform. The site was launched in July 2024.
Pym lives in Toronto with her husband, her daughter and son-in-law, and 2 grandchildren, as well as a happy bouncy poodle and a large extended, interesting family all over the world.
Courtney Brownell
Communications and New Media Officer, University of Toronto
Courtney Brownell is a seasoned Web Content Strategist at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. With nearly 20 years of experience in higher education marketing and communications, Courtney has held various roles that emphasize design and the digital experience.
Most recently, she was an integral part of the team that led the multi-year project to revitalize and relaunch the Rotman School’s main website. She was awarded the “Staff Excellence Award” for her role in the project.
Courtney firmly believes in the power of brand and design, advocating that a website is one of the most important tools and the ultimate expression of an organization’s brand.
Courtney has an honours degree in Communications and Multimedia and has studied User Experience Design.
Courtney lives in Toronto with her husband and three-year-old daughter, where she spends most of her time wrangling said three-year-old daughter and gardening.