Goals, success metrics, scope, stakeholders, a competitive audit, the content inventory and the 14-week timeline.
The challenge
A college with a 130-year story and a website that could not tell it.
Palmetto Ridge Junior College serves 2,450 students across the Lowcountry: 41% are the first in their family to go to college, 34% are adults 25 and older, and 410 are military-connected. Most of them meet the college first on a phone. The legacy site was an aging, unstructured CMS with about 640 pages, PDFs in place of real content, no mobile layout and admissions forms that dropped into a shared inbox where inquiries sat for days.
The college asked for more than a new look. It needed a website that helps a prospective student pick a program and ask a question in minutes, a portal that tells current students what is due, and a CMS that lets a small communications team publish the same day without calling IT. We framed the work as a redesign and CMS modernization on Drupal 11, delivered in 14 weeks across four phases: Discover, Define, Design and Develop.
All participants, figures and quotes are part of this fictional case study.
Hawk Portal at /portal: classes, holds, balance, degree progress, deadlines
Editorial workflow with revisions and five roles
News, events, directory and 11 athletics teams
Content migration and redirect map for legacy URLs
Out of scope (phase 2)
Live integration with the student information system (portal uses sample data)
Online application and payment processing
Native mobile app
Full Spanish translation (key admissions pages only at launch)
Learning management system changes
Brand identity refresh and paid media
Stakeholders
Eight groups, each with a different reason to care. We met with every one of them in the first three weeks.
Stakeholder
What they need from the site
Involvement
President’s office
A site that reflects the college’s history and its growth story to the community and funders
Sponsor Approves goals and design
Admissions
More qualified inquiries, tracked in one place with clear status
Core Weekly working sessions
Communications
Publish news and events the same day, keep the brand consistent
Core Owns content after launch
Academic Affairs
Accurate program details, credentials and outcomes
Review Signs off program content
Athletics
Schedules, rosters and results for 11 teams without waiting on Communications
Review Own editing role
Student Affairs
Deadlines, holds and advising reach students before problems grow
Review Portal content owner
IT
A secure, supported platform with fewer one-off requests
Advise Hosting, security, SSO plan
Students
Fast answers on a phone: programs, cost, deadlines, what is due
Research Interviews and usability tests
Competitive audit
We reviewed four peer colleges a student in the Lowcountry might also consider. Names are withheld; the patterns are what mattered.
Criteria
Peer A – regional technical college
Peer B – state community college
Peer C – private two-year college
Peer D – large urban system
Program finder with filters
Strong
Basic
None
Strong
Mobile experience
Fair
Good
Poor
Good
Cost shown on program pages
No
Linked PDF
No
Yes
Request info in under a minute
Long form
Yes
Email only
Long form
Adult and evening learners addressed
Yes
Buried
No
Yes
Spanish content
No
Some
No
Yes
Accessibility (automated scan)
Fair
Good
Poor
Fair
What we took from it
1No peer showed cost, length and format together on a program page. Doing that became our clearest point of difference.
2The best finders filter by outcome (“start working fast”, “transfer”) as well as subject. We added both.
3Short forms win. Peer B’s four-field form converted best in our test clicks, so ours asks for just five required fields.
4Adult learners are an afterthought almost everywhere. With 34% of students over 25, Palmetto Ridge speaks to them on the homepage.
Content inventory
Before designing anything we counted what was there. The numbers made the case for structured content on their own.
640
Legacy pages
212
PDFs, many the only source of key facts
38%
Pages outdated by a year or more
9
Different page templates
0
Structured programs
Every program was a free-form page with a different layout. Nothing could be filtered, compared or reused.
Content health (640 pages)
Keep and migrate: 31%
Rewrite into structured content: 27%
Merge with another page: 14%
Retire and redirect: 28%
Timeline
Fourteen weeks in four phases, with overlap where research and design could safely run side by side.
DiscoverDefineDesignDevelop◆ Milestone
W1W2W3W4W5W6W7W8W9W10W11W12W13W14
Kickoff & stakeholder interviews
Interviews
Student research & survey
10 interviews, 900 surveys
Content inventory & analytics
640 pages
Personas & journey maps
Personas
Information architecture
Sitemap, card sort
Content model & workflow
Types, roles
Wireframes & user flows
Wireframes
Visual design & design system
Palmetto theme
Usability testing
Prototype tests
Drupal build: theme & content types
Build
Dashboard, portal & inquiries
Staff & student tools
Migration, QA & launch
QA, training
1The client asked to see and approve the complete design before any build began. We moved the design approval to week 9 and started development the same week, so the request cost no time.
Team & governance
Small team, clear owners, one weekly decision meeting.
How decisions were made
A steering group (President’s office, Admissions, Communications) met weekly for 30 minutes and made every scope call.
Communications owned final copy; Academic Affairs signed off program facts.
Each phase ended with a written sign-off before the next began.
Accessibility issues were treated as defects, never as nice-to-haves.
After launch
Five roles set up: Content Editor, Communications, Admissions, Athletics, Student
Editor training and a one-page guide built into the Dashboard
