Case Study
Rebuilding the Digital Front Door for an Ivy League University
Brown University
The Problem
A Decade of Digital Sprawl
Brown University's public-facing web ecosystem had grown organically over more than a decade. Hundreds of department sites ran on aging infrastructure with inconsistent design, fragmented content governance, and mounting accessibility compliance requirements. Content editors across dozens of departments needed a system they could manage independently without breaking shared infrastructure.
The Approach
A Unified Platform with Distributed Control
- Platform Architecture — Multi-site CMS allowing departments to manage content within a shared, brand-consistent framework.
- Accessibility-First Development — WCAG 2.1 AA from the start, with automated testing in the development pipeline.
- Performance Optimization — Caching, responsive images, lazy-loading.
- Content Governance — Review, approval, and publication workflows at scale.
- Migration Strategy — Incremental migration preserving URLs and SEO.
The Results
Scale, Consistency, and Compliance
- Unified platform serving hundreds of department and program sites
- Consistent brand experience across the university web presence
- Reduced time-to-launch for new sites from weeks to days
- WCAG 2.1 AA compliance across all components
- Improved Core Web Vitals scores
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