VHS rebranding and SEO
May - October 2024
Eastern Virginia Medical School integrated with Old Dominion University on July 1st, 2024. Eastern Virginia Medical School was renamed Macon & Joan Brock Virginia Health Sciences at Old Dominion University.
Role: Lead web developer
Responsibilities: Development, implementation, accessibility, research, documentation, SEO, Google Analytics, reporting
- Accessibility
- Bootstrap
- CSS
- Terminalfour CMS
- Google Analytics
- JavaScript
The VHS website will transition to ODU's content management system, Drupal, within the next year. In the meantime, the EVMS website has undergone a significant renaming and minor rebranding, which includes updates to fonts, colors, and the addition of new design motifs.
Additionally, I upgraded most of the site from a third-party proprietary HTML and CSS framework and Bootstrap 3 to Bootstrap 4. It was also during this process that I implemented CSS variables to make the rebranding process easier.
After completing the rebranding, it was requested that I shift my focus to improving SEO for the VHS website. Due to past issues with page load speeds, I implemented the following enhancements across the site:
- A Content Delivery Network (CDN) was established for both image and non-image files hosted in our media library.
- I utilized an image compression service provided by the Terminalfour CMS, which significantly reduced image sizes in most cases.
- Metadata was added to the website to enhance basic SEO.
- Additional measures were taken to decrease load times by instructing browsers to only load the necessary CSS for each page and by implementing lazy loading for all images and videos below the hero section.
I recorded Google Lighthouse scores before and after implementing the CDN and the image compression service.
To aid understanding, I created a glossary and a Google Lighthouse scoring information page, as these terms may not be familiar to those outside the web development field.