First, who is Erikson Institute?
Erikson Institute is the nation’s premier graduate school in child development. Since 1966, they have prepared professionals to understand and meet the changing needs of young children and their families. They focus exclusively on children from birth to age eight—the most important formative years.

Their vision is that every adult who works with young children or on their behalf will be knowledgeable, aware, skilled, and alive to the possibilities of each child’s life. They offer master’s degrees, a doctoral program, graduate certificate programs, and a wide array of professional development opportunities for those seeking to improve their practice and sharpen their skills.

The Erikson Institute Challenge:
Design and develop a new website for Erikson Institute, a prestigious graduate university focusing in early childhood development. Use the online environment to complement a newly launched rebranding effort for Erikson. How?

Develop a comprehensive, user-friendly content management solution that allows for customization of every single aspect of the website—right down to the spacing of text and placement of images. Essential functionality to include course catalog, housing volumes of research, papers and articles published by the teachers and staff, bios, community tools, easy microsite generation, and registration and eCommerce tools to allow for students to register and pay for courses.

The Merge Solution:
Using the Merge Framework™, Merge built a robust, fully extendable solution that enables Erikson to control every aspect of their website. In addition to managing all content, imagery and eCommerce functions, Merge introduced extensive community tools, online curriculum and course registration.

Erikson’s online solution features a robust course and curriculum system, the Professional Development Course catalog. This module allows both prospective and existing students to browse entire degree tracts, review course information, as well as register and pay for all of their courses online.

Erikson’s extensive Content Management System heavily leverages the Workflow Module of the Merge Framework™. Using the workflow tools, multiple content editors, professors, staff and other users are able to upload specialized content per their permissions and submit it through the approval process before going live.

Additional functionality included a robust search engine with standard features such as ranking, abstracts, etc. Erikson’s new site supports W3C compliance and standards as well as ensuring ADA compliance.

Merge’s Framework™ provides control over all aspects of the Erikson Institute website using approved industry standards and tools for ease of use and efficient content management. Our CMS module provides control over the creation and modification of page templates using intuitive WYSIWYG and HTML controls, allowing microsites like The Fussy Baby Network and Herr Research to be created quickly and easily.