Getting Started

Your guide to building a modern, accessible, Emory-branded website.

Emory Universal Drupal Site Builder

All Emory websites share two fundamental goals—to communicate Emory's message about its vision and mission and to make it easy for online visitors to find the information they need on all university websites.

The Universal Drupal Site Builder platform is designed to create sites aligned with the Emory brand and accessible to all audiences. There is no coding experience needed with this user-friendly interface.

Still not sure where to begin? Our Writing for the Web tutorial is a great way to think through your content as it relates to the voice and tone of the Emory brand.

Whether you are migrating or creating a new website, planning your structure and content will ensure an efficient and successful project. A content audit and sitemap will make your site building process smoother.

Now that your content and structure are set, it's time to start building.

How to Create or Migrate a Website

To get started building a new website or migrating your current site into the new platform, follow these steps.

  1. Request a Domain Name

    By university policy, all domain names for Emory websites must be approved through the Domain Name Request process. For sites migrating to Drupal that are not changing their existing domain, this requirement is waived.

    Domain Request Form

  2. Provision a Site

    The Office of Information Technology (OIT) is responsible for site provisioning. Emory websites are published using Drupal 10. All websites share the same content management system. The Emory codebase maintains brand consistency across the ecosystem. You can request a site in Univeral Site Builder through OIT Service Now Form. is not a "theme" or a "template" in the Cascade sense, so you do not have to specify a "standard template version."

    Provisioning Request

  3. Learn the System: Training and Documentation

    C&M has prepared training videos and documentation to support the transition to Universal Site Builder. When you are ready to build your site, please request access to our Brainier course on Drupal. You will find videos and information on how to make pages, organize your content, and make an accessible site, among other topics. An example of the type of videos you will find in Brainier:

    Drupal Basics

    • How do I get started?—logging into Drupal, accessing your site, what you can/can't access by role
    • Where do I go?—content dashboard, finding and filtering existing pages, orienting in the administrative user interface (UI)
    • Initial building blocks—introduction to Mercury Editor, pages vs. components, adding/reordering/removing blocks on a layout
    • Workflows—content states (draft → review → published), moderation, and approvals

    Watch on Vimeo

    Core Task Videos

    • Creating content—building a standard page start to finish in Mercury Editor
    • Menus: main navigation, footer and sidebar—editing the three menu systems
    • News content—creating and publishing a news story
    • DAM/media management—uploading, organizing, and reusing digital assets
    • Tags and RSS feeds—how tagging drives feeds

    Additional courses and documentation will be added to Brainier throughout the year.

  4. Start building your site

    Use everything you have learned in Brainier to begin building your site. The Mercury Editor will make it easy to organize your content. If you are starting with a legacy site from Cascade, you will need to do a component mapping exercise to determine which Drupal components will be best for your content.

    Need help while building your site? Attend our Office Hours.

  5. Launch with Quality Assurance (QA) Review

    Prior to launch, your site will undergo a QA review by the digital strategy team in Communications and Marketing. In this review, we'll check for content, brand, and technical quality. This review request must be submitted at least two weeks in advance of your planned go-live date. Failure to provide sufficient review time may affect your launch date.

    Upon QA approval, your site is ready to launch. OIT will move your site from devevelopment to public.

    Go Live Request (available soon)

    Prior to launch, OIT requires a trigger to launch your site. Please refer to the OIT Web Hosting page for additional information.

Follow Accessibility Standards

At Emory, we strive to conform to WCAG 2.2 accessibility standards at the AA level. In order to achieve this level of accessibility, the SiteImprove suite is deployed on a regular basis to automatically check for errors. However, not every accessibility issue can be detected automatically—content editors and web developers should work together to make their websites as compliant as possible.

Additional Accessibility Resources

Project Requests

Communications and Marketing has moved to the Wrike project management system to handle incoming requests, from maintenance requests to multifaceted campaigns. If you have a request or question for us, please use the Wrike request form to get started.