Post-launch data reflects January–March 2026, compared to the same period in 2025. Sites launched August 2025.

Overview

When their migration came due for the College of the Arts and the four associated schools, it arrived with a non-negotiable deadline driven by an internal college restructuring and a competing institutional priority already splitting my team's attention.

What made this batch distinctive wasn't just the timeline pressure. It was the strategic pivot it required. These sites weren't simply being migrated, they were being fundamentally reframed. Content that had been organized around internal audience categories was rebuilt around the goals of the university's most important external audience: prospective students. That reframe, which was developed and refined through this project, became the navigation template I continue to apply across college and department migrations as I go forward.

The Challenge

A content direction that wasn't working.

The sites sitting on the legacy platform have a tendency to organize content around audience labels with sections called "Prospective Students," "Current Students," and "Faculty." While this is a common structure that sounds logical, it creates friction in practice. The structure reflected how the institution thought about its audiences rather than how users actually navigate.

An institutional restructuring mid-migration.

The School of Music and the School of Dance & Theatre had previously existed together as the Department of Music & Performing Arts. The restructuring created two separate schools, each needing its own site, while simultaneously renaming all departments to schools across the college. The only property unaffected by this change was the School of Architecture and Design. Every other site was, in some sense, a new entity.

A compressed timeline with divided attention.

The deadline was set by the college restructuring, not by migration readiness. At the same time, a university-wide accessibility initiative was running in parallel, requiring significant attention from the same lean team executing this migration. There was no option to defer either project.

The Approach

Reframing the Navigation from Audience-Based to Goal-Based

The most significant strategic decision in this project was scrapping the audience-based navigation model entirely. Rather than asking users to self-identify before they could find content, every site was restructured around what users were actually trying to do.

The new model replaced sections like "Prospective Students" and "Current Students" with goal-oriented sections:

Before

Current Students

Prospective Students

Faculty & Staff

After

Academics

Admissions

Resources/Experience

The specific labels were determined by the nature of each site’s content and student community rather than applied uniformly. Both Music and Dance & Theatre required areas that showcased their performances, both for functional and recruitment purposes, so their navigation reflects that.

This framework worked well enough that it became the standard template I now apply to all subsequent college and department migrations. The problem was solved once in a way that scaled.

Leaning Into Prospective Students as the Primary Audience

The university’s goal for our websites is student-centered and recruitment-focused. That means making explicit choices about content hierarchy; what leads, what gets buried, and what gets cut.

Every page was evaluated through a single lens: does this help a prospective student understand what it would mean to study here? Faculty research interests, internal administrative information, and content primarily relevant to current students were deprioritized or moved. Program descriptions, outcomes, student work, and application pathways were elevated.

CTAs were placed at the natural decision points in each user journey rather than relegated to a sidebar or footer. The goal was to reduce the distance between arriving on the site and taking a meaningful action.

Managing the Deadline Without Cutting Corners

With the deadline fixed and attention divided, the execution strategy was sequencing. The parent site went first to establish the visual and content standard the schools would follow. Each school site was built against that established template, which reduced decision fatigue and kept quality consistent across all five properties.

Final approval (always the longest variable in any university migration) was managed by presenting complete, polished builds to stakeholders rather than drafts requiring imagination. Showing them what done looked like consistently shortened the review cycle compared to earlier projects in the migration timeline.

Results & Data Context

These sites launched August 20, 2025, as part of the university's broader migration from subdomain to subdirectory architecture — moving from arts.louisiana.edu to louisiana.edu/arts. The comparison data below reflects January through March 2026, a period 4-7 months post-launch.

A note on organic search metrics:

Subdomain-to-subdirectory migrations produce a predictable temporary decline in organic search performance. Even with redirects in place, Google recrawls and reindexes new URLs over time, a process that typically takes 6-12 months for search authority to fully redistribute. The restructuring that split the Department of Music & Performing Arts into two separate schools compounds this effect, as one URL with accumulated search history became two new URLs with no independent history. These drops are expected, monitored, and not a reflection of content quality.

The metric that matters most at this stage:

New users (visitors arriving through channels outside organic search) indicate whether the content is resonating with audiences who find the sites through direct traffic, referrals, and word of mouth.

The College of the Arts' 86% increase in new users is the clearest signal that the recruitment-focused reframe is reaching prospective students.

Architecture & Design's new user decline is consistent with the URL migration impact, it had the most established search presence of the five properties and is showing the most acute redistribution effect.

A note on Music: One of the many problems of not having a dedicated analytics specialist on the team is that things go unnoticed sometimes. The analytics seemed to have an issue with setup during the migration, so tracking was disabled and I have no data here.

A note on Dance & Theatre: I have baseline data for the new D&T site, but since it was split from the previous Music & Performing Arts combined site (on which music had taken over the majority of the site), no reliable changes can be recorded.

I'm monitoring organic search recovery across all five properties over the 12 months post-launch as the new URLs build equity.

What I Learned

The navigation pivot on this project taught me something worth carrying forward: audience-based navigation feels logical from the inside and creates friction on the outside. Organizing content around what users want to accomplish and not who the institution thinks they are is a small structural change that produces a meaningfully different experience. The fact that this framework became the standard for subsequent migrations is the outcome I'm most proud of. Solving a problem well enough that it doesn't need to be solved again is the best kind of efficiency.

The data context also reinforced something about how to read post-migration analytics honestly. Organic search drops in the months after a URL restructuring are not a content verdict, they're a technical transition in progress. Knowing the difference between a signal and noise, and being able to explain that distinction clearly, is as important as the numbers themselves.

Skills Demonstrated: Content Strategy · UX & Navigation Design · Information Architecture · Recruitment-Focused Content · Audience Analysis · Stakeholder Management · Analytics Interpretation · SEO & Migration Strategy · WCAG Accessibility · Drupal 10 · Google Analytics 4 · Deadline Management · Cross-Functional Collaboration