The new CUNY Humanities Alliance has started a publishing and communication platform, CUNYHumanitiesAlliance.org, built on WordPress and Commons In A Box. The purpose of the website is to facilitate connections between faculty, mentors, staff, graduate students, and undergraduates that distance and commuting make difficult, and to capture the work of the Humanities Alliance for public outreach and engagement. Our hope is to create a site for crowd-sourced, participant-created content, where students, faculty and staff across multiple campuses can share research, pedagogical innovations, and information about relevant humanities conferences, seminars, workshops and public programming throughout the city.
The platform is built with the needs of LaGuardia Community College (CUNY) students in mind to address questions of access. Humanities Alliance development priorities include design and functionality to support mobile use, and minimizing data usage by optimizing images and supporting email replies to discussion forums. The site’s structure will change as the community of users grows and the needs of this living network become evident.

About the Humanities Alliance

The purpose of the CUNY Humanities Alliance, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is to train graduate students in the most successful methods for teaching humanities courses to racially and economically diverse undergraduates while also working to support undergraduate community college students in their humanities education and career interests. Graduate students receive robust professional development training and shadow faculty at LaGuardia Community College. Graduate Fellows will then teach their own courses at LaGuardia Community College, with subsites for their courses built on the Humanities Alliance website. For LaGuardia students in the Humanities Alliance courses, the program offers enrichment activities to improve their understanding of the humanities and the pathways that lead to degree completion.

Job Description

The WordPress Developer will be responsible for building and maintaining a user-friendly and fully functional web platform for the Humanities Alliance. The list of development needs related to this position will change over time, and as its community of users grows.
The following is a list of immediate development tasks that reflect that the project is still in the early stages of the process:

• Implement responsive design, optimized for most widely used devices
• Investigate the amount of data the site currently uses (and optimize media files for users with mobile devices)
• Design and implement new page layouts, including blog layout
• Add an events module, and incorporate RSS feeds of other Graduate Center calendars
• Create documentation for users, including graduate students building course sites on the platform
• Evaluate and test use of site navigation, recommending and implementing changes

Required Qualifications

• 1+ years of experience developing and administering WordPress sites
• Ability to create and customize WordPress plug-ins
• Proficient in HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, PHP
• Development using responsive design, including the use of CSS frameworks (e.g. Bootstrap, SASS, etc)
• Experience developing subdomains and subsites
• Experience building in test and dev environments, working in cpanels, and with domain redirects
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Ability to meet deadlines
• Ability to work independently, and to maintain regular communication with the Humanities Alliance team

Preferred Qualifications

• 2-4 years of experience developing and administering WordPress sites
• Familiarity and experience developing with the Commons in a Box package based on WordPress/BuddyPress
• Background in humanities or working with humanities organizations or institutions
• Based in NYC, though most of the work should be remote
• Formal experience with UX design
• Proficient in Adobe Creative Suite for design
• Familiarity with the CUNY system
• GitHub experience
• Experience with project management software (e.g. Asana)

Structure and Pay

We are flexible on the structure of the contract. This can be structured as a standard hourly contract for a pre-defined scope of work, with possibility for extensions and future contracts. For applicants who are students of the Graduate Center, this position could be structured as a Graduate Assistantship. The ideal applicant would be open to continuing to support the project through long-term maintenance over the next four years. We anticipate the work being about 80-120 hours per year.

Applications

Send your cover letter, resume, and sample(s) of your work to website@CUNYHumanitiesAlliance.com.

Deadline

Review of applications will begin on November 21, 2016; applications received by this date will receive full consideration. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis until the position is filled.