OHO U Webinar: How to Build a Website to Empower Content Creators

More and more institutions are developing centralized design systems — sets of reusable components and patterns — to enable designers to quickly lay out consistent solutions. But how can the front-line communicators — typically, the content editors working in the CMS — best employ these solutions to achieve specific goals? How do you select and prioritize components? And what words and message should fill out those patterns? Georgy Cohen from OHO and Dave Olsen from West Virginia University (WVU) will discuss how to think more holistically in creating website approaches that leverage the potential of design systems while empowering content creators to use them effectively. 

Georgy will lay out a broad vision for how to think about your website project in a way that centers the content author — delivering guidelines and training, promoting sustainable governance, creating content-centered design solutions, and more. Then Dave will walk through how WVU is translating its design system for content authors, empowering them to quickly create rich pages where they have creative control. He will also share reasons why your university may want to adopt a component-based approach to content authoring even if you don’t have a formal design system in place.

Georgy Cohen has spent nearly 20 years wrangling digital content for universities, newspapers, and a host of other organizations. She is director of digital strategy at OHO, a full-service digital agency based in Boston, Massachusetts. Georgy previously worked at Tufts University and Suffolk University, in addition to running her own independent consultancy to higher education. She speaks frequently at industry conferences such as HighEdWeb, CASE, and ContentEd. Georgy's background is in journalism, including a three-year stint working in the fast-paced online newsroom of The Boston Globe.

Dave Olsen has been a programmer and content wrangler with the University Relations - Digital Services unit at West Virginia University (WVU) for the last twenty years. Over that time he has worked on and led projects that range from developing a university-wide CMS to creating award-winning marketing websites. For the last five years he has worked on building a "central source of truth" for academic and institutional information. The project now powers the WVU home page and other high visibility properties. In addition to his work at WVU, Olsen has released and contributed to a number of open source projects with the most recent being Pattern Lab, a frontend workshop environment that helps you build, view, test, and showcase your design system's UI components. He enjoys living where systems and content mix.