I am very happy to announce the all-new website WPHighEd. I’m hoping that the site will gradually grow into a community of people using WordPress at higher education institutions. Right now, there’s not much to look at, but hopefully that will change in the near future.
Until then, here are a few notes:
Who Am I?
I’m Curtiss Grymala. I work as the University Webmaster at the University of Mary Washington, and also run a freelance web design/development/consulting company in my “free time”. While I’ve played with WordPress on and off for about 6 years, I developed my first full-fledged WordPress website in 2009. My background is primarily in PHP and MySQL, with, obviously, a strong concentration in WordPress. I have been dabbling in HTML (and ultimately CSS and JavaScript) since the mid-90s.
Since then, I’ve played with WordPress a lot, I’ve learned a lot, and I continue to learn new things every day. At UMW, I am fortunate enough to work with WordPress every single day; I try to come up with new, cool ways to use WordPress, and I try to make our WordPress site the best it can be for our users.
I also have done some WordPress consulting for various organizations at large higher ed institutions.
What Is WPHighEd?
Right now, not much of anything. However, I hope a community will begin to form around the site. I’d like to start building a gallery or portfolio of higher ed sites that are using WordPress; whether it’s being used as a standard blogging platform, a full-fledged CMS, or a completely different platform (LMS, Catalog system, etc.).
I am also hoping to begin collecting and posting tutorials and case studies related to WordPress and how it’s being used in higher education; build some sort of a regular virtual meetup of people using WordPress in higher ed, etc. (maybe through a Google Hangout, or a Webinar-style or something); and I’d like to begin collecting various presentations, workshops and talks that have been made at conferences and webinars related to WordPress in higher education.
How Can You Help?
This site is purely a hobby for me, but I have seen a need for this sort of thing in the WordPress & Higher Ed Web communities, so I wanted to try to put something together. I am always open to suggestions and offers for assistance.
If you’re interested in helping out, please let me know. I am currently working on building and testing the form that will be used to submit your sites, but I’d love to have some help in testing that out. I am also very open to hear ideas about how this site should grow, and in what direction it should go.
Finally, as you may have noticed, the site currently uses an off-the-shelf Genesis child theme, but I know we can do better. If you want to try your hand at putting together a design, or even a new WP theme for the site (I can certainly put the theme together, but I don’t have a single “design” bone in my body, so I won’t be messing with that), that would be awesome.
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