Haring Center’s Professional Development Unit’s Shopify site

Posted by on Mar 6, 2017 in Recent work, Websites | No Comments

Haring Center PDU Shopify site

My latest website project has been to develop a Shopify website for Haring Center’s Professional Development Unit (PDU).

Haring Center’s PDU offers professional development opportunities including workshops, live and recorded webinars. As part of the University of Washington, we use Bridge, a Learning Management System (LMS) by Instructure, to present our courses. This new Shopify site allows our customers to be able to purchase our courses and link to the course materials on Bridge.

Detail of Haring Center PDU Shopify site home page

My task was to create the Shopify site, style it with Haring Center’s brand and modify the theme to market our courses. While I’ve worked with many CMS platforms to create websites, this project presented some new challenges — for me and for the University of Washington’s IT department.

The university is piloting Bridge but this is the first time they’ve tried to enable users to purchase courses through a Shopify ecommerce website. On the Bridge side, the UW’s IT group worked with Instructure to create a portal for the PDU’s courses to link to our Shopify site.

Because Bridge and Shopify are separate systems, only a limited amount of information gets passed between the 2 different systems. This meant that we did a lot of user testing to ensure that the sites worked together and effectively marketed our courses — often creating work-arounds for features that weren’t supported by both platforms. In the end, we’ve created a system that is user friendly and our audience is able to purchase the courses that they want to take through our new Shopify site.

Visit Haring Center PDU’s Shopify site.

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