Bates College wins eduStyle Judged & People’s Choice “best site” award
Jake Goldman on
Last summer, we had the privilege of collaborating with the brilliant designers at Tellart and the IT team at Bates College to rebuild the college’s website on WordPress. Our mission was to build a durable, modular framework that would balance the consistency and unique features envisioned by Tellart with some department personalization and a clean administrative experience consistent with the needs of each departments (apparently, Food Services didn’t understand why there were sports scores; food fights are not scored). We were proud to hand off just that framework to the talented developers at Bates who ran with it.
Today, I learned that the project won both the “Judged” and “People’s Choice” category for “Best Overall Website” – the top category – in the 2012 eduStyle Awards. Bates was also nominated for “Best Home Page” – the second highest honor – which it won the “People’s Choice” award for. The awards, in their 5th year, celebrate the best work in college and university websites.
While this is exciting news for entirety of the Bates’ website team, it’s also exciting news for WordPress. Although the lie that WordPress isn’t a “real CMS” is mostly promulgated by vendors threatened by its success, many large organizations still profess some concern about WordPress’s suitability to “enterprise CMS” title. Bates College, 2012’s best college website, powered by WordPress, is just another nail in that coffin.