GrUSP is the Italian association that for twenty years has been promoting best practices in the web development world by organizing international conferences, workshops, and training initiatives for developer communities and digital professionals. We worked alongside the team in the design and development of a custom WordPress multisite theme, accessible by design and intended to be tailored and adapted to the different conferences in the network: uxday, cssday, phpday, and many others. The result is a modular platform: scalable and easily navigable by everyone, in line with performance and inclusivity goals.
Request
Create a more accessible, flexible, and easily manageable digital system for all GrUSP conferences.
Result
A single theme for the entire GrUSP ecosystem: usable, scalable, updatable, with optimized performance and guaranteed accessibility.
Analysis
The project began with an exploratory phase, during which we used the previous sites to analyze information flows, content structure, and user behavior.
By analyzing the existing structure, we identified a critical bottleneck: each edition was published on a separate site, which meant that older editions continued to rank better than newer ones, penalizing the visibility of current events.
Our proposal was therefore to centralize each conference on a single domain, with an internal archiving system. This approach brought immediate benefits: more efficient management, better information findability, clearer visibility for new editions, and a more solid and continuous digital identity over time.
User experience
Approaching the User Experience project, we set ourselves an important goal. We wanted not only to improve the end-user experience but also to facilitate and optimize the content management and administration experience.
In a joint session between designers and developers, we mapped all the key moments in the lifecycle of several GrUSP conferences — from the call for papers to ticket sales, from speaker announcements to the archiving of previous editions.
This process allowed us to focus on real editorial and organizational needs, offering a shared vision of the functional and narrative priorities that then guided the design of the modular system currently in use.
We also concentrated on the user experience, focusing on critical site navigation moments, such as consulting the conference program. To address this, we designed a flexible, mobile-first schedule to facilitate smartphone navigation during the live event.
UI and Accessibility
The UI phase involved designing a coherent and scalable design system, capable of adapting to every GrUSP event while maintaining the consistency of the main brand.
The project was developed according to accessibility by design principles, ensuring compatibility with assistive technologies and a correct semantic structure through rigorous development. Thanks to an intelligent color management system, each conference can be customized by selecting one or two primary colors. The system automatically adjusts to maintain a level of accessibility compliant with WCAG 2.1 AA standards, even in the case of complex combinations, thanks to a visual reinforcement logic.
To further strengthen readability, the Atkinson Hyperlegible font was chosen. Designed by the Braille Institute together with a team of designers, it is highly distinguishable even for those with visual impairments.
The font is based on characters with clearly differentiated shapes, with intentionally accentuated details on commonly confused letters such as the lowercase “i” and “l”. This typographic choice guarantees greater visual clarity both for people with visual disabilities and for those browsing from devices with small screens.
WordPress Multisite
The system is built on a WordPress Multisite architecture, allowing the GrUSP team to manage all conferences from a single WordPress installation, customizing color palettes and logos through a back-end options page.
These simple settings, and the automations associated with them, are able to uniquely characterize each site within the network.
The sites managed by the network:
The effort to design an easy-to-use schedule page also resulted in a page that is easy to manage. This synergy between administrative simplicity and user-side usability was achieved thanks to a data-oriented architecture that clearly separates the time structure (slots) from the content (Talks, Workshops, Panels, Lightning Talks…), allowing for great flexibility in organizing multi-day and multi-track events.
Even non-talk moments, such as keynotes, breaks, or community sessions, are fully integrated into the planning, maintaining visibility and consistency throughout the event flow.
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