Branding

In marketing research, a "brand" is a set of beliefs people associate with a psychological entity, like "Apple" or "Linux." Beliefs are complex, especially since different people draw different inferences from the same information. For example, a radio ad for a university program might cause one person to think,

"That sounds interesting. I should check it out."

Another person might think,

"Only low quality services advertise on the radio. I'd better avoid that university."

A simpler view is that a "brand" is a set of visual standards for publications, including web pages. Standards cover typefaces, colors, logos, and so on. We'll go with this use of the term "brand," since, when it comes to making websites for skills courses, this is what universities want to standardize.

Skilling is built on Drupal, a popular open source content management system. Drupal separates the look of a site from the underlying data processing. The files that determine fonts, colors, logos, etc., are called a "theme" in Drupaland.

Skilling comes with a custom theme designed to meet US accessibility standards, that runs on mobile devices, that helps with security... in other words, does what US universities want to do.

You can make a subtheme based on the Skilling theme. You alter just the things that need to be different, like colors and the logo. You can leave everything else alone. This means that:

• You save time, since you don't need to rewrite everything. In fact, you probably won't change very much at all.
• Updates to the Skilling custom theme won't erase your own changes.