Customizing the title page, or building it from scratch

[angoodkind]

How do I make the title page format (very) different? My university guidelines require, e.g., the university name to be at the top of the title page: https://www.tgs.northwestern.edu/documents/academic-policies-procedures/dissertation-formatting-pdf-template.pdf

I found an old issue, but the links are outdated: https://github.com/kks32/phd-thesis-template/issues/90

To save myself the headache of tweaking the cls file, I'm fine building a custom title page and replacing the default title page. But when I added \title{On ducks and their love for dissertations} to thesis.tex, it only replaced the title, and not the rest of the title page text.

How should I go about reformatting the title page? If I should do it in the cls file, can you just provide a quick example of how I'd move the school name to the top?

EDIT: I see that I can use \begin{titlepage}...\end{titlepage} in thesis.tex to build my own title page. However, one snag I am hitting is that I need the title page to appear without a page number, but still counted as Page 1, so that the next page, e.g. the Dedication, shows up as Page 2. I got this to work with the default title page (https://github.com/kks32/phd-thesis-template/issues/232) but now it no longer counts the title page as the first page.

[angoodkind]

Please disregard. This SO answer seems to have solved the issue:https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/172005/47655