On Monday, November 10, 2025, Ashley Ryan and Audra Berner presented at the MarComm Bites & Insights In-Person Meeting on 3 topics:
- An overview of what University Communications & Public Affairs (UCPA) does (specifically relating to websites)
- An overview of what Web & Mobile Services (WMS) does
- Introducing the Web Council
I'm going to skip over the Web Council for now - that is something that is currently being formalized, and a separate news article can be dedicated to that. I want to take this time to touch on the first two items and provide some context as to what UCPA does and what WMS does.
University Communications & Public Affairs (UCPA)
The web team within UCPA manages the main university website at lehigh.edu including the top-level pages for Academics, Research, Admissions, etc. These are pages that convey Lehigh's brand, strengths, and research impact while supporting the undergraduate and graduate admission process and student yield goals. UCPA also manages other storytelling and high-importance websites (e.g., Lehigh News).
In addition, UCPA supports the Lehigh News website, the Asset Bank, and Lehigh's events calendar.
Web & Mobile Services (WMS)
WMS was formed in 2012 to meet the website needs of the university that were outside of the scope of UCPA, including the development and maintenance of 4 of the 5 college websites. Through a more centralized website platform, we're able to offer standardized creation, support, documentation, and training for department and stem websites. These standard websites (like this one!) offer a common set of functionality and a similar theme (the look and feel of the site) that are created within the branding and visual identity guide set by UCPA. This website solution is built using the Drupal content management system which allows us to develop no-code website creation tools so that our website owners do not have to know how to code to create their pages.
All of our websites, regardless of whether it is standard or more custom, are also provided with integration with the university events calendar, integration with the emergency alerts system, SEO optimizations, and Google Analytics for data collection and reporting.
Currently, we maintain 108 Drupal 10 websites and 12 Drupal 7 websites. This includes a mix of those "standard" websites as well as custom websites, both built in-house or with varying degrees of external vendor support. Some examples of situations in which external vendors can be useful include custom design work or content strategy.
I typically tell people "If it's not the College of Arts & Sciences (since they have their own web team) and it's not the main Lehigh website, then it's likely a WMS website."