All metrics reflect a two-week post-launch comparison against the same period the prior year.

Overview

Three of the university's most active student-facing offices had been living on legacy web infrastructure long past its expiration date. The Office of Student Engagement & Leadership, Fraternity & Sorority Life, and the University Program Council sit at the heart of campus life, but managing a website isn't their job. Keeping students engaged, programming events, and running organizations is. The web had fallen to the bottom of a very long priority list.

When their turn came in the migration queue, I was largely on my own. No dedicated web support existed within any of the three offices, the content was severely outdated, and the stakeholders who needed to be involved were understandably too busy to make this a priority. What followed was one of the more satisfying projects in the migration timeline: a full content overhaul, a UX-led redesign, a systems solution that made the sites genuinely low-maintenance, and post-launch results that validated every decision.

The Challenge

Content that had aged out entirely.

Each site still referenced multiple previous platforms used to manage student organization events, memberships, and office operations — none of which were the platform currently in use. Students landing on these pages were being directed to tools that no longer existed. Beyond the platform references, general content had gone stale in ways that ranged from mildly outdated to actively misleading.

Stakeholders with no bandwidth.

The staff running these offices are embedded in day-to-day campus life in a way many university departments are. Getting their attention long enough to review content, provide updates, or approve a launch required patience, persistence, and a process that minimized what I was asking of them at any given moment.

No dedicated web support.

None of the three offices had a Web Ambassador or designated content manager actively maintaining their sites. That meant there was no internal advocate for the project and no one to catch content issues between launches. Whatever I built needed to work without ongoing intervention.

A maintenance problem waiting to happen.

Student organization events are high-frequency, time-sensitive content. If the solution required manual content updates every time something changed, these sites would be outdated again within months. Solving the immediate content problem without solving the maintenance problem wasn't really solving anything.

The Approach

UX-Led Navigation Redesign

My first focus was the navigation. The existing structure reflected how the offices thought about their own work… not how students actually used the sites. Using analytics data and an understanding of the primary user goals, I restructured the navigation to surface what students were actually looking for: how to get involved, what events were coming up, and how to connect with specific organizations. Pages that existed primarily for internal reference were deprioritized or consolidated. Clear user pathways replaced the previous structure, which had grown organically without intentional design.

Elevating the Right Content

Once the structure was right, I focused on what lived within it. I sourced strong visuals from the university's creative services team, rewrote copy to be direct and student-facing rather than administrative, and placed CTAs at the points in each user journey where action was most likely. Every content decision was filtered through one question: does this help a student do what they came here to do?

Building for Low Maintenance

This is where the project got interesting. A significant portion of what students come to these sites for is event information… and events change constantly. Rather than building a content model that required manual updates, I found a configuration within the university's existing calendar system that allowed me to import the student organization event feeds directly. Events published to their student organization platform now flow automatically into the university calendar and surface on their websites without anyone touching the CMS or the calendar. The sites stay current without requiring ongoing intervention from offices that don't have the bandwidth to provide it.

This wasn't a custom technical build; it was knowing the tools well enough to connect them in a way that hadn't been done before. The value was in identifying the problem clearly and finding the right solution within existing infrastructure.

Stakeholder Coordination With Minimal Bandwidth

I structured the review process to minimize friction for the offices. Rather than asking open-ended questions or sending drafts for general feedback, I presented complete, polished content builds and asked for specific factual corrections. This approach to show them what done looks like and ask them to confirm accuracy dramatically reduced the cognitive load on stakeholders and kept approvals moving. The final approval process still extended the timeline by approximately two months, but the structured approach kept it from going longer.

Results

Measured against the same two-week period the prior year, the launches delivered:

• +39.5% average engagement time

• +20% sessions from organic traffic

• +25% sessions from direct traffic

• +9% active users

• +8% new users

For sites that had received no meaningful attention in years, these results reflect what happens when content is built around what users actually need rather than what's easiest to maintain.

What I Learned

The most important decision I made on this project wasn't a content decision, it was recognizing that a technically correct migration wasn't enough. Sites that are accurate at launch but impossible to maintain are just problems deferred. Solving for sustainability meant understanding the offices' real constraints and designing around them rather than expecting the offices to adapt to a process that didn't fit their reality. That shift in thinking from delivering a launch to delivering a system that works after the launch, is something I carry into every project now.

Skills Demonstrated: Content Strategy · UX & Navigation Design · Information Architecture · Analytics-Driven Decision Making · Content Auditing · Systems Thinking · Stakeholder Management · WCAG Accessibility · Drupal 10 · Google Analytics 4 · Process Design · Cross-Functional Collaboration