WordPress theme

University Marketing & Communications manages an on-brand WordPress theme for the UW. The theme is included in our web hosting and is available to any UW organization to download from GitHub and install on a WordPress site.

The UW WordPress Theme can help you quickly and easily build on-brand websites. It is packed with tons of features and various styles that can help make your content shine.

Documentation

If you are new to WordPress and need to learn how to use the tool, we recommend taking the WordPress Essentials Training on LinkedIn Learning. LinkedIn Learning is available for free to all students, faculty, and staff through UW’s Career Center.

The Web Strategy team has created a series of helpful guides you can use to get started building or managing your websites. These guides can help you make important decisions that showcase your content and build a site that puts your users first.

For more advanced users, we have a complete list of short-codes and additional features that you use to give your site a style of its own while remaining on-brand.

Accessibility

We have worked to build and accessible theme, and we continue to improve the accessibility of the theme. We have partnered with Accessible Technology Services to help in our development.

As you build and maintain your website, you will need to keep accessibility in mind. Accessible Technology Services has a wealth of information on how to make your website more accessible. We highly encourage reading through their IT Accessibility Checklist as you get started building or maintaining your site.

Developer resources

If you are installing our theme on your own, we recommend reading through our documentation before you get started. If you are a developer and want to use our theme for your website or project, we have additional developer documentation to help get you started.

Child theme

We encourage you to download a starter child-theme that works with our WordPress theme for projects that need additional on-brand features or customizations that better meet your organization’s needs. Using this child theme with our theme will allow you to update to new releases and not lose your changes.

We recommend you keep the audience-based navigation in the header to ensure users have a seamless experience across the UW Web (Students, Parents, Faculty & Staff, Alumni). However, we realize this is not always possible. Feel free to contact us if you would like to talk through options and solutions.

We also encourage you to retain the search function, Quick Links, social icons and copyright information as they appear in the main theme. Again, this ensures a smooth user experience across the vast UW Web.

Legacy theme

For the 2022-2023 academic year, we will continue to provide support for our previous WordPress theme, named “UW 2014.” We will patch any large-scale bugs for during this time, but we will not release any new features to that theme. We strongly recommend converting to the new “UW WordPress Theme.”