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Government website redesigns are rarely simple. They need to serve the public clearly and equitably, support internal teams, meet accessibility requirements, and integrate with existing systems. Over time, even well-structured sites can become difficult to navigate, inconsistent across departments, and hard to maintain.

When this happens, the result is fragmented information, frustrated users, and staff who struggle to keep content accurate and up to date. A redesign is an opportunity to address these issues at their root, not just update the visual design.

University website redesigns are rarely simple. They involve multiple audiences, distributed content ownership, accessibility requirements, and deep integrations with campus systems. Over time, even well-built sites can become difficult to navigate, inconsistent across departments, and hard to maintain.

When this happens, the result is fragmented content, frustrated users, and teams that struggle to keep the site accurate and up to date. A redesign is an opportunity to address these issues at their root, not just update the visual design.

Search is one of the most important and most overlooked parts of a website.

Many organizations have large amounts of content, but users struggle to find what they need. Traditional search often returns long lists of results with limited context, leaving users to sort through pages on their own.

AI can improve this in a meaningful way.

We work with universities, government agencies, and other content-rich organizations to design and implement AI-driven search experiences that make it easier for people to find information quickly and confidently.

Designing higher education websites is fundamentally a question of structure. How content is organized, how users move through the site, and how systems support that experience over time all have a greater impact than visual design alone.

When these decisions are not handled well, the result is websites that are difficult to navigate, inconsistent across departments, and challenging to maintain.

Many organizations are still dealing with older Drupal implementations that have become difficult to maintain. Over time, content structures drift, custom code accumulates, and upgrades become harder to plan.

A migration is an opportunity to reset that foundation.

Most organizations have a sense that accessibility needs attention, but it is not always clear where the issues are or how serious they are.

An accessibility audit provides a clear picture of how your site is performing against WCAG guidelines, along with a practical path forward. The goal is not just to identify problems, but to understand what needs to be addressed first and how to approach it in a way that holds up over time.

What is open source?

Open source refers to software or other products that are developed collaboratively and made available to the public with the source code openly available for modification and redistribution. This means that anyone can view, modify, and distribute the code, provided that they adhere to the terms of the license under which it is distributed.

1. Unsplash (for images)

One of the big headaches you can get as a designer is finding quality demo content to use in designs. Sure you can use the watermarked low-quality images from stock sites such as Shutterstock and iStock, but they won’t look great, and will only take away from your design work.

With some exceptions, most of the work we’ve done in higher education / EDU has been with Drupal. There are always the miscellaneous WordPress or React projects, but for many situations Drupal has been the better choice for universities.

Major Drupal-to-Drupal migrations are soon going to be a thing of the past, because of the easy upgrade path that has been established with Drupal 8. However, Drupal remains one of the most popular Content Management Systems (CMS) for very good reasons, and there will always be a need for migrations for sites with a lot of content coming from forlorn CMSes, or from proprietary systems that cost an arm and a leg and lack the flexibility that Drupal provides.

Drupal core (basic out-of-the-box Drupal) comes with a set of modules that provide for its basic functionality, which include Node (content), Views, User, Taxonomy (categories), etc. In addition, the large and active Drupal community provides a huge variety of contributed modules.

Fighting the tide is never a solution

As a designer, it’s hard enough to convince yourself it’s worth both the investment of time and cost in changing to a new piece of software, incorporating systemic change to your processes seems a daunting if not overwhelming task that recalls the old adage ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ But to convince an entire workforce to take a bold new direction in how they run the design department, re-structure all your existing processes from initial mockups, prototyping and production handover?