UWEC Redesign
University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire
The University of Wisconsin Eau Claire (UWEC) knew they wanted to make some big changes.
Important content targeting prospective students was being obscured by too many other messages, and confusing navigation and pathways to apply. The University brand itself needed a refresh. They questioned the value in continuing to support a custom CMS to power the website, or hosting the website internally.
The UWEC team had the talent and drive to make changes. But they also knew they could use outside help.
Before the site redesign, first 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 workshop 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.
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.
The new site was designed in conjunction with a school rebranding, introducing bold new colors, interactive media, modern stylings, and engaging interfaces.
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.
UWEC had a fully-functional, custom CMS. One of the primary jobs of our dev team was to migrate all of the content out of both webpages and custom components into a new, open-source CMS (Drupal), while minimizing the amount of time needed for manually migration.
Our team of migration experts was able to map large amounts of existing content from the old site to the new. We also redefined and rebuilt the tools themselves (in Drupal), implementing a new component-based system using Layout Paragraphs and Layout Builder in Drupal.
