Overview

When the University of Louisiana at Lafayette set out to migrate its entire web ecosystem from Drupal 7 to a modern Drupal 10 platform, the scope was significant: 150 websites spanning every college, department, office and research center on campus. What began as a content writing role supporting the main louisiana.edu relaunch evolved into something much larger: sole strategic and operational lead for one of the most complex digital transformation projects in the university's history.

This is not a story about a clean, well-resourced migration with a tidy finish line. It's a story about building governance frameworks from scratch, making strategic pivots when the original plan wasn't working, and delivering measurable results at a scale that required as much institutional navigation as it did content expertise.

The Challenge

Enterprise-scale web migrations are complex under the best circumstances. This one came with a particular set of constraints:

• Decentralized content ownership. Every department managed its own content with no consistent standards, no dedicated personnel, and varying degrees of engagement. Some stakeholders were eager collaborators. Others were too busy to prioritize a web migration… and some hadn't updated their content in years.

• Legacy content in rough shape. Many sites referenced deprecated resources, obsolete programs, and broken user pathways. Content audits regularly surfaced material that hadn't been touched in three to five years.

• Approval cycles outside my control. Subject matter experts and unit leadership had to review and approve content before launch, a necessary step that routinely extended timelines by weeks or months regardless of how well the content was prepared.

• Competing institutional priorities. Major university initiatives regularly redirected attention and resources mid-project, requiring constant reprioritization without losing momentum.

• A lean team. For the majority of this project, strategic ownership fell to two people and for the past several months, I've been the sole senior strategist driving the migration forward.

The Approach

Governance Before Everything Else

Before migrating a single site, I focused on building the framework that would make the entire project scalable. Every subsite would follow consistent structural logic (standardized navigation patterns, WCAG-compliant content requirements, and brand-aligned messaging) regardless of which department owned it. Getting that foundation right early meant every subsequent launch was faster and more consistent than the one before it.

Inheriting and Evolving the Web Ambassador Network

The university's Web Ambassador Network, a community of 200+ content managers embedded across departments, was already operational when this project began. My role was to keep it running, overhaul the training program to reflect new platform requirements and governance standards, and manage access across a constantly shifting roster of contributors. The network served as the institutional bridge between centralized standards and decentralized content ownership, and keeping it functional and informed was critical to the project's long-term success.

Recognizing When to Pivot

The original migration model asked Web Ambassadors to build their own content directly into the new platform with guidance from my team. In practice, this created bottlenecks with inconsistent execution, user frustration, and a timeline that wasn't going to hold.

Rather than pushing forward with a model that wasn't working, I tested a change in the process that resulted in a full overhaul of the migration project. My team took over direct content builds, presenting completed migrations to stakeholders as polished templates rather than asking them to construct pages from scratch. This one shift changed everything: less friction, faster approvals, better content quality, and a project that started moving again.

The results were concrete. Early in the project, a single average-sized site took approximately eight months from kickoff to launch largely due to the coordination overhead of the original model. After the pivot, we moved to launching batches of sites that could be done in roughly three months. That improvement reflects the process change, two years of accumulated institutional knowledge, and a refined batching approach working together. The one bottleneck that remains is review and approval from unit leadership, which is an institutional reality we continue to manage through proactive communication and phased review checkpoints.

A Phased Approach Based on Priority and Complexity

Rather than working through a linear queue, I developed a phased migration strategy that balanced institutional deadlines, site traffic, content complexity, and stakeholder availability. High-traffic student-facing sites were prioritized early to deliver impact quickly. More complex college and department sites followed as the governance framework matured and the team's execution efficiency increased.

The Migration Process Itself

For every site, regardless of size or complexity, the process followed the same consistent structure:

1. Content audit - identifying outdated, redundant, or inaccessible content before touching the platform

2. IA and navigation redesign - restructuring based on user goals, analytics data, and institutional priorities

3. Content development - rewriting, condensing, and optimizing for clarity, SEO, and accessibility

4. Stakeholder review - coordinating subject matter expert input, revisions, and approvals

5. Pre-launch QA - accessibility checks, link validation, and cross-device review

6. Launch and monitoring - post-launch analytics tracking and iterative improvements

Some of the Results

Student Engagement Sites

Three of the university's most active student-facing offices presented a particularly complex migration challenge. Content on the Office of Student Engagement & Leadership, Fraternity & Sorority Life, and the University Program Council sites were severely outdated, stakeholder bandwidth was minimal, and the offices had no dedicated web support. Working largely independently, I facilitated a full content overhaul, redesigned the navigation to reflect actual user goals, and automated an event import from their student organization platform into the university calendar eliminating the need for manual content duplication and creating a genuinely low-maintenance build.

Within two weeks of launch, the results were clear:

• +39.5% average engagement time

• +20% sessions from organic traffic

• +25% sessions from direct traffic

• +9% active users

• +8% new users

College of the Arts

Five schools within the College of the Arts (Architecture and Design, Dance and Theatre, Music, Visual Arts, and the college itself) were migrated simultaneously under a compressed deadline driven by an internal college restructuring. Due to one department splitting into two and all departments transforming into schools, all content had to be combed through and adjusted when flagged.

Content across all five properties was reframed from informational to student-centered and recruitment-focused, with elevated CTAs, streamlined navigation, and a consistent visual and messaging hierarchy across the family of sites.

The batch launched on schedule despite competing institutional priorities splitting the team's attention throughout the project.

Outcomes

Across all launched sites to date, this migration has delivered:

• 22% increase in CTR through improved navigation, content clarity, and intentional user pathway design

• 97% reduction in accessibility issues through WCAG-compliant content standards applied at every launch

• 99% reduction in SEO errors through technical cleanup and on-page optimization built into the migration process itself

• Up to 100-position improvement in search rankings through keyword strategy, content restructuring, and performance tracking

• CASE Circle of Excellence Award recognizing the strategic impact of the digital transformation on institutional marketing and student recruitment

What I Learned

The sites that launched smoothest were never the ones with the most resources or the most cooperative stakeholders. They were the ones where the governance framework did the heavy lifting before anyone opened a content editor. Getting that foundation set with the right standards, processes, training, clear ownership turned out to matter more than execution speed. The pivot away from ambassador-led builds taught me that a well-intentioned process that isn't working is just a polite way of staying stuck. Recognizing that early and changing course was one of the better strategic calls I've made on this project.

Skills Demonstrated: Content Strategy · Information Architecture · Drupal (7, 10) · Web Governance · WCAG Accessibility · SEO Optimization · Stakeholder Management · Change Management · Process Design · Google Analytics 4 · Siteimprove · Project Leadership · Cross-Functional Collaboration · Training & Development