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Engagement 03 · Higher education · Lead web development

Ronin Labs · Engagement dossier · No. 03

One university. Two schools. An embedded web role.

From July 2018 to October 2019 the engagement ran across two Temple University schools at once — the School of Sport, Tourism & Hospitality Management and the Fox School of Business. It began alongside the incumbent web developer and, after his departure, became the contracted role filling that web-development position while Temple searched for a full-time replacement.

Temple University School of Sport, Tourism and Hospitality Management website homepage, 2019.
Fig. 01STHM homepage, 2019 — archival capture of the property supported during the engagement
  • Jul 2018 — Oct 2019
  • STHM + Fox School of Business
  • Lead + front-end web development
  • Embedded institutional support

At a glance

Scope
2 schools

STHM + Fox School of Business

Engagement span
Jul 2018 → Oct 2019
Operating model
Embedded

Temporary successor to the in-house web-development role

Executive DBA inquiry flow
Web → CRM

Public request form connected to Salesforce

This engagement is reported by scope and responsibility. Traffic, enrollment, and conversion figures are deliberately omitted — the record supports what was built and how it was operated, not performance claims.

01 — Context

The role crossed school boundaries.

Higher education rarely hands an outside developer the keys to two schools at once. This engagement got there by being present before the gap opened.

  1. 01

    Alongside the incumbent

    July and August 2018: front-end and site optimization work on STHM, working alongside Ed Fischer, Temple's web developer.

  2. 02

    The position opened

    Ed Fischer left Temple, leaving a web-development role that both schools depended on day to day.

  3. 03

    Brought back jointly

    Fox and STHM together brought the engagement back as the contractor filling that web-development position while Temple searched for a full-time replacement.

  4. 04

    Embedded across both

    The result was one embedded role serving two schools — not two unrelated freelance projects running in parallel.

02 — Operating surface

Inside the web operation.

Read as layers rather than one literal architecture: the surfaces the public used, the systems behind them, and the coordination that kept changes safe to ship.

  1. L1

    Public experiences

    • STHM site
    • Fox academic + program pages
    • Landing pages

    What prospective students, faculty and industry partners actually saw.

  2. L2

    Front end

    • Responsive implementation
    • UI behavior
    • Content templates

  3. L3

    CMS / platform

    • WordPress
    • Custom fields
    • Drupal (separate supported Fox environment)

    WordPress carried the day-to-day work; Drupal existed as a separate Fox environment.

  4. L4

    Institutional systems

    • Salesforce
    • Forms
    • CRM handoff

  5. L5

    Delivery

    • Dev / staging
    • QA → production
    • Task triage
    • Archives + backups

  6. L6

    Infrastructure coordination

    • Temple IT
    • Server / VPN / SSH access
    • Security remediation

03 — STHM

Continuity after a handoff.

A school's website does not pause while a university runs a search. The first job was making sure nothing was lost in the transition — and that routine change stayed routine.
Archival capture of the Temple University STHM website homepage from 2019.
Fig. 02School of Sport, Tourism & Hospitality Management — 2019 capture

The handoff brought archives, databases, backups, and environment access with it. From there the work was operational: a separate development environment where change could be made and reviewed, then QA and a controlled promotion to production.

  • Archives & databases

    Inherited site archives, databases, and backup routines so the school's history stayed intact through the transition.

  • Landing-page system

    A landing-page setup and redirect handling for program and recruitment needs.

  • Staging → production

    Update requests triaged into Trello tasks, resolved on a separate dev environment, then deployed to production after review.

  • Central IT collaboration

    Server, VPN, and SSH access coordinated with Temple IT — the same coordination that covered the Fox side.

04 — Fox Strategic Plan 2025

Turning strategy into a living digital publication.

The Fox School's Strategic Plan 2025 was the major 2019 project. Design direction came from Fox's communications, design, and web collaborators; the engagement's part was turning that approved direction into a working responsive site the school could keep operating.
  1. 01Design collaboration
  2. 02Front-end implementation
  3. 03Institutional deployment

  1. 01

    Goals

    Implementation

    Interactive goal set with fly-out detail behavior, reworked so the same interaction reads correctly on small screens rather than collapsing into a list.

  2. 02

    Communications & articles

    Implementation

    Article and communications layouts so the plan could keep publishing after launch instead of freezing as a static document.

  3. 03

    KPI & Accomplishments

    Content architecture

    Custom fields behind the KPI and Accomplishments content so progress entries could be maintained by the Fox team as structured data.

  4. 04

    Feedback pathways

    Implementation

    Routes for the community to respond to the plan, wired into the site rather than bolted on beside it.

  5. 05

    Static vs dynamic

    Architecture

    Deciding, section by section, what belonged in hard-coded templates and what needed to be editable, dynamic content.

  6. 06

    Environment migration

    Deployment

    September 2019: the temporary stratplan.cloudaccess.host environment decommissioned with approval, content moved into dev.fox.temple.edu/strategic-plan for continued updates and fixes.

Attribution note: visual design direction was a collaboration owned by Fox's communications and design partners. The contribution recorded here is lead and front-end implementation, content architecture, and deployment.

05 — Web → CRM

The interface did not end at submit.

For the Executive DBA program, the Request Information form was rebuilt so an inquiry landed in Salesforce as a usable record — which made it a coordination problem as much as a front-end one.
  1. 01

    Program-defined fields

    Required identifiers and inquiry fields agreed with the Executive DBA program team and Fox's CRM manager before anything was built.

  2. 02

    Public web form

    The Request Information form on the Executive DBA experience, rebuilt against those requirements.

  3. 03

    Web-to-Salesforce

    Submissions posted into Salesforce with the identifiers the CRM needed to attribute and route the record.

  4. 04

    CRM team & follow-up

    Notification and submission behavior tested with the CRM and program teams so an inquiry reached a person, not a queue nobody watched.

06 — Timeline

Sixteen months, two institutions.

  1. Jul — Aug 2018

    Alongside the incumbent developer

    Front-end and site work on the STHM property alongside Ed Fischer, Temple's web developer — implementation support and image and site optimization.

  2. Oct 2018

    Filling the web-development position

    After Ed Fischer's departure, Fox and STHM jointly brought the engagement back to fill the web-development position while Temple searched for a full-time replacement. Archives, databases, environments, and access were handed over.

  3. Late 2018

    Operating both surfaces

    STHM staging and dev environment, content and template updates, landing-page system, and redirects; on the Fox side, ongoing academic and program page work plus form and Salesforce groundwork.

  4. Feb — Mar 2019

    Executive DBA web-to-CRM

    The Executive DBA Request Information form was rebuilt to submit into Salesforce, with required fields agreed with Fox's CRM manager and program team, and notification and submission behavior tested end to end.

  5. May — Sep 2019

    Fox School Strategic Plan 2025

    Design collaboration with Fox communications, web, and design partners, then front-end implementation of the approved direction: static versus dynamic content architecture, responsive Goals interactions, communications and article layouts, KPI and Accomplishments custom fields, and feedback pathways.

  6. Sep 2019

    Environment migration

    With approval, the temporary stratplan.cloudaccess.host environment was decommissioned and the content moved into dev.fox.temple.edu/strategic-plan for the latest updates, bug fixes, and copy changes.

  7. Oct 2019

    Close of engagement

    The contract engagement closed as Temple's permanent path was settled. The in-house successor role was available; the decision was to remain independent.

What this engagement demonstrates

Trusted inside the institution. Chose to stay independent.

  • 01

    Cross-school trust

    Two Temple schools jointly relied on one outside practitioner to hold a web-development role during a search.

  • 02

    Embedded delivery

    Task triage, staging, QA, and production deployment run inside the university's own working process.

  • 03

    Systems fluency

    WordPress, front-end implementation, Salesforce form integration, and central IT coordination treated as one operating surface.

  • 04

    Independence

    The permanent in-house successor role was available at the close of the engagement. The choice was to remain independent.

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