Introducing new, free website design and development tools
October 20, 2021 1:01 PM

Dear Colleagues,

A cross-disciplinary team of faculty and staff from marketing, communications and technology teams across our campus has been working to create a new set of free templates, tools and resources to help colleges, departments and units build and maintain engaging, useful and accessible websites that also meet our brand standards.  

There are a number of new web design patterns and components and themes available for immediate campus use, including those compatible with the most popular campus platforms. You can take advantage of their work by visiting the Illinois Web Theme, which features information, resources and contacts for getting involved and staying involved in this important work. It is important to note one of the foundational priorities of this project was to build out these resources to make them useable at every level of web development and design expertise–from beginner to expert.

I want to offer my appreciation to the members of the Web Implementation Guidelines Group (WIGG), who came together on a voluntary basis to help us find easier, cheaper solutions that deliver more consistency in our branding and messaging platforms.   

Their innovation and drive will do more than facilitate a stronger, more consistent web presence across the university. It will save our units time and money. Working with outside vendors to create properly branded websites can be labor intensive and costly, and it puts units with fewer resources at a disadvantage. WIGG’s new templates and tools are free and can be implemented immediately for campus website creation or redesign projects.  

These past two years have demonstrated just how important our web and digital spaces are to our ability to deliver on every phase of our land-grant university missions. These sites and resources are the first point of engagement for many who join the Illinois family, but they have also become the virtual foundations for our educational, outreach and research enterprises. Thanks to the very hard and very thoughtful work of WIGG in these past months, we have an important new set of tools to help us tell our stories and to put the world-changing power of Illinois innovation in the hands of those who need it most.   

I encourage you to explore your website options, join the community building upon this foundation and communicate with the teams that can implement them.

Sincerely,

Robert J. Jones
Chancellor