Strategic Planning
Before the site redesign, Electric Citizen was first engaged to work with the UWEC on an extensive strategic review. Using our "Foundation" strategic discovery process, we worked with the client through a number of key explorations and decision points.
Activities included a series of discovery workshops and site audits, including site analytics, content modeling, content moderation, design and UX/UI, editorial experience, site performance, hosting and developer workflow, and SEO.
We also engaged UWEC in some initial content strategy discussions, drafting a new sitemap, content framework and content requirements documentation.
Completing the process, our team delivered a full strategic brief and discovery report, with a series of recommendations for moving forward with a future redesign. This process formed the foundation for the redesign work to follow.
Redesign and Rebuild
Building on the work done so far, we then engaged with the UWEC team on a full site redesign.
We worked closely with their marketing and communications team, reviewing and rewriting content and purging content that was no longer relevant or effective. The overall site navigation was redesigned and simplified with a focus on prospective students, while moving more internally-focused content to a separate intranet.
From a technical perspective, we consulted with their development team on the current (custom) CMS, ultimately recommending a move to a wider supported and active CMS (Drupal), and leading the efforts to migrate content to the new system.
UWEC led the brand refresh with their internal team; our role on the visual side was to consult, offer feedback, and contribute design decisions throughout — and then to translate the new brand into a bold, modern, interactive site experience in Drupal.
Content Guidance
Our team helped guide content development for the new site, including a full site audit, developing a new content playbook, guidance on the rules for content governance, and content workshops with site editors.
We consulted with their marketing and communications team on a weekly basis as they proceeded with the long task of editing and rewriting content site-wide.
Migration and Site Building
UWEC had a fully-functional, custom CMS built and maintained in-house. One of the primary jobs of our dev team was to migrate all the site's content — both standard pages and custom components — into a new, open-source CMS (Drupal), while minimizing the amount of manual migration work required of the UWEC team.
Our migration team mapped large volumes of existing content from the old site to the new, using automated scripts to handle the bulk of the transfer. We also redefined and rebuilt the site's authoring tools in Drupal, implementing a component-based system that gives editors flexible, reusable building blocks for composing pages.
