Strategic Planning
Before any redesign, UWEC engaged Electric Citizen for an extensive strategic review. Using our Foundation discovery process, we worked through the key questions and decisions with their team.
We ran discovery workshops and audited the site across analytics, content modeling, content moderation, design and UX/UI, editorial experience, performance, hosting and developer workflow, and SEO. We also started the content strategy work: a draft sitemap, a content framework, and documentation of content requirements.
The process wrapped up with a full strategic brief and discovery report, including recommendations for the redesign. That report became the foundation for everything that followed.
Redesign and Rebuild
With a plan in place, we moved into a full site redesign.
Working closely with UWEC’s marketing and communications team, we rebuilt the navigation around prospective students and moved internally focused content to a separate intranet.
On the technical side, we consulted with UWEC’s developers on their custom CMS and recommended moving to Drupal, a widely supported, actively developed open-source platform. The new site runs on Pantheon, a managed hosting platform built for Drupal, so UWEC no longer maintains its own servers.
UWEC led the brand refresh internally. On the visual side, our role was to consult, give feedback, and contribute design decisions throughout. Then we turned the new brand into a bold, modern, interactive site in Drupal.
Content Guidance
We guided content development for the new site with a full content audit, a new content playbook, content governance guidelines, and workshops with site editors.
We also met weekly with UWEC’s marketing and communications team as they took on the long work of reviewing, rewriting, and cutting content across the whole site.
Migration and Site Building
UWEC’s custom CMS was fully functional, built and maintained in-house. Our development team’s main job was to move all of the site’s content, both standard pages and custom components, into Drupal. We did it while keeping the manual migration work for UWEC’s team to a minimum.
We mapped large volumes of content from the old site to the new one and used automated scripts for most of the transfer. We also rebuilt the site’s authoring tools in Drupal as a component-based system. Editors now build pages from flexible, reusable building blocks.
