Managing a large number of web properties at scale

As the programs and initiatives of the university continue to grow, so too do the number of web properties needed to support them. Most of these new sites were created separately, giving the initial implementation team a lot of flexibility but creating both a maintenance and governance problem long term. Furthermore, these sites were built in varying technologies, which made maintaining them all the more difficult.

With such a high number of individual sites, our client's developers began to have trouble keeping up with needed updates. Even though a lot of their sites started from a shared template, updates needed to be applied manually to many of the sites. This required a technical re-architecture and re-platform to Drupal 9.

The individual nature of these sites also created a marketing problem in that the university's brand was not always applied uniformly. Separate themes meant that there were small discrepancies between sites. Furthermore, what happens when the brand gets updated? The development team would have to update many individual themes, which would be extremely duplicative and time-consuming. The answer: building a pattern library.

In order to address this issue, we worked with our partners to shift from a project-based mindset to a product-based mindset. In other words, we agreed to approach future projects with the perspective of the entire digital portfolio in mind. Doing these changes successfully transforms an investment in a single web property, into an investment in the university’s digital presence as a whole, potentially benefiting dozens of stakeholders at once.