Tufts

Offering over 90 undergraduate and 160 graduate programs across 10 schools, Tufts is a private research university of the highest order. Their largest school is the School of Arts & Sciences (A&S). The school and its departments are supported by a “technology team”–headed up by a practical but innovative thinker by the name of Thom. 

Before Thom arrived at Tufts, the team he took over was (historically) one that was solely responsible for IT and development support. As time went by, overworked and time-strapped content managers from various departments would reach out, looking for more than just IT help–what they really needed was content entry help.

When Thom saw what the departments really needed, he had a vision: he would evolve his team to become more consultative–providing UX/UI, design, and content support (in addition to their IT and development services)–essentially positioning his team as an in-house agency. 

But there were some challenges to realizing this vision–the first being that the many departments within the school still had websites scattered across multiple CMS platforms; this meant that his team needed to be trained on managing each different CMS, being constrained (at times) by limits of older technology, AND significant time spent trying to create brand uniformity across disparate sites.

To mitigate this challenge, Thom reached out to my friends at Adapt Agency (US) to help develop a strategic plan for streamlining the technology side of things. Once it was decided that moving all of the sites into a standard install of Drupal (with shared templates and design elements) was the best approach, I came to the table with the strategic content management plan to audit, document, update, and then migrate all of the content from each of the 27 department sites into their new homes on Drupal.

Significant time was spent capturing:

• Navigation structure and site architecture (if pages were created within a hierarchy OR all just at the domain level)

• Broken/outdated links 

• Links to outside sites that would need to be periodically reviewed to ensure they remained active/correct

• Pages that acted as indexes for an area of the site (instead of relying on the website’s navigation) 

• Page titles that did not align with page content (very bad for SEO) 

• Content spread across several pages that could be condensed 

• Duplicate content

• Hidden pages AKA pages “not in navigation” but still accessible by clicking around

• Informational content in images that was not also available on the page and/or without alt text (an ADA violation)

• A reliance on PDFs to supply content instead of making the information available on the web page itself (a potential ADA violation if PDFs are not accessible and just not great for users in general!)

• Template/design elements (accordions or a grid of cards, etc.) so that all necessary elements could be re-created and multiple departments could display the same steps of content in consistent ways. 

I also dug deep into Analytics (for departments that had it) identifying pages that weren't getting significant views in order to help prioritize the content to be migrated and to hone in on places content could be summarized or potentially combined with other related content in places more likely to be see and used by site visitors. 

The relaunched site is easier to navigate, has consistent branding and presentation of content, and is significantly easier for Thom’s team to manage. The process, and the resulting websites, were so successful for Thom’s team that they later came back for help with a similar project within the Cummings Veterinary School–auditing and combining 14 individual subsites into one single Drupal site. 

The grander vision (of the whole project) is to ultimately streamline all sites within the Tufts Universe.