Website Support and Maintenance Services

The Vendor is required to provide website support and maintenance services for ongoing support, maintenance and enhancement of the university’s primary website.
- Website is built in Drupal and is hosted on the pantheon web hosting platform.
- Web services team in university marketing and communications to ensure the website remains secure, accessible and aligned with institutional branding standards.
- Support and project work contract that will provide both routine operational support and the capacity to complete defined web development projects as needs arise.
- Requirement:
1. Ongoing support and maintenance
•    Monthly Drupal core, security and module updates
o    Continuous monitoring with review and validation of automated pull requests to ensure main site stability, security and performance through backend updates, maintenance and rapid response to urgent needs.
•    Support for regular backups and efficient recovery process.
•    Timely troubleshooting, bug fixes and incident management to minimize disruption.
•    Pantheon hosting platform support.
•    Proactive monitoring and validation of PHP and all site dependencies, ensuring secure and timely upgrades.
•    Ongoing code quality reviews aligned with best practices, leveraging automated code sniffing, validation and testing prior to deployment.
•    Clear delineation of responsibilities between hosting provider and development team to ensure efficient escalation and issue resolution.
•    Front-end theming, user experience improvements and third-party integrations.
•    Development of automated tests to enhance system stability and confidence in changes and deployments.
•    Quality assurance testing for functionality and usability, with appropriate documentation.
•    Technical expertise and strategic guidance, including support for enhancements, improvements and feature development.
2. Accessibility, compliance and quality assurance
•    All vendor-created web pages, templates, digital components, tools and content must comply with WCAG 2.2 level A and level AA (or most current version) and comply with section 508 standards.
•    The vendor is responsible for supporting accessibility, usability and compliance with applicable standards through review and testing
o    Using site improve and manual methods.
o    Any items not meeting accessibility requirements must be remediated or removed.
3. Project management, collaboration and communication
•    Bi-weekly meetings and stable deployments to staging and production environments, supported by automated and human QA processes.
•    Use of advanced testing environments (e.g., tugboat) to validate changes before they go live.
•    Dedicated project management, including backlog grooming, prioritization, technical coordination and transparent reporting for planning and billing.
•    CMS expertise, clear documentation and knowledge transfer.
•    A consistent project team focused on university needs, providing both technical expertise and responsive communication.
•    All required tools and platforms needed to perform work and conduct business with university must be included in the vendor’s pricing (e.g., tugboat, GitHub, slack)
o    Ticketing system costs may be included as part of the support contract or will need to be noted if separate.