15 Years Strong
Web Standards Group

The WSG was formed in May 2005 as a subcommittee of the New Business Architecture (NBA) group, whose mission is to champion campus-wide information systems strategic planning and coordination. Student Information Systems & Technology Associate Director Lubomir Bojilov conceived, proposed, and organized the subcommittee, and served as its first chair.

The WSG became a task-level subcommittee/working group reporting directly to the ITPG in Fall 2005. Work began on the initial version of the webguide shortly thereafter. The initial version was brought before the ITPG for acceptance in late 2006 and was finally approved by the ITB in January 2007.

The WSG is active in promoting development and training opportunities for web professionals at UCSB. Since 2006, the group has organized a large number of free workshops and Brown Bag forums on web standards, web accessibility, web applications security, web content management systems, and related topics. Video archives of recorded events are available through the UCSB Gauchocast service. The Office of Information Systems and Technology, the Division of Student Affairs, and the Disabled Students Program have provided support for this training.

In September 2012, the WSG organized a subcommittee to update the web guide, bringing the guide up-to-date with modern web development and design best practices as well as newer policy compliance and web accessibility requirements.

In 2013, amid restructuring of IT units within UCSB, the reporting chain for many of the ITPG formed working groups, including the WSG, was transferred to the UCSB IT Council.

In 2015, the webguide’s underlying infrastructure was migrated from an on-campus hosted solution to Github using Github Pages. This was to allow more rapid content development within the webguide and broader community contribution and collaboration leveraging the Github platform.

In 2020, the webguide was transitioned to Drupal, the preeminent campus content management system.