Princeton Web Development Services

The Client

Princeton Web Development Services (WDS) is a software and application service department within Princeton University’s Office of Information Technology and serves as an integral part of the Princeton community at large. The group manages an internal service for the Princeton community — including departments, centers, and programs — providing them the flexibility to design and build websites with little to no technical skills, as well as access to a professional team when they need extra help.

The Situation

As is common among institutions of higher learning, Princeton University owns thousands of individual sites under its single brand. The University’s WDS team realized that for the organization’s sites to satisfy and connect with users at various touchpoints, they needed a platform that could support a consistent experience and a unified brand across sites. 

The Challenge

Princeton faced a massive, intricate migration. It needed to migrate 650 sites to a new Drupal 9 platform and develop more than five additional themes and features  — each with its own variations and settings — required to support those sites. And it needed to happen before Drupal 7 reached end of life. 

But the sheer number of sites to migrate wasn’t the only complicating factor. All sites were required to remain functional from one migration stage to another. Princeton WDS needed to ensure that migrations were done in batches, releasing developments in strategic, small groups so that the migration and go-live impacts were minimized, helping the organization maintain its standard of reliability throughout the project. 

Princeton WDS also wanted to use this project as an opportunity to proactively plan for the future; the team needed support creating more automation processes to transfer content, branding, and layouts from an older site version to a newer one without so much manual overhead. The team realized that these newfound capabilities would help alleviate headaches, streamline internal efficiencies, and prepare them for whatever was ahead.

The Solution

Princeton partnered with FFW, and the teams conducted a technical audit and discovery, laying the foundation for future development and migration to an optimizable platform that will support their internal teams for years. After the discovery phase, FFW hit the ground running. WDS expertly managed the platform build, while FFW’s digital experts focused on the data migration and theme development work.

Considering the level of accuracy and precision that the migration scripts required, creativity abounded. FFW’s experts created independent, tailored migration plans based on the site type. FFW’s engineers strategically made the migration scripts as reusable as possible, allowing the teams to keep pace with the tight timeline without jeopardizing site functionality — ensuring the WDS team could continue doing their jobs. 

Princeton’s ability to create consistency across its university websites is primarily owed to adopting a multisite approach — using one code base for multiple websites. This allowed Princeton — whose brand is spread over thousands of websites and interacted with by various user audiences with vastly unique needs — to have a flexible yet structured and consistent approach. Using Acquia’s Site Factory platform, WDS can create sites with rigid branded features that suit the institution’s reputation while embedding them into flexible layouts and themes, depending on the site owners’ unique needs.

The Results

Princeton WDS and FFW successfully migrated 650 sites, and the new platform offers many benefits: new sites enjoy architectural improvements, consolidated branding, more effective content presentation, and enhanced data accuracy. Thanks to templates, sites are much easier to get up and running, and the process is much more automated — ultimately saving WDS time, money, and many headaches.

WDS can now support more websites without increasing staff. By templatizing their site formats, WDS can quickly get hundreds of sites up and running, efficiently releasing feature enhancements and bug fixes and successfully delivering on future requests from internal teams for existing sites. WDS can more easily create new sites and issue improvements in more streamlined and strategic ways, leading to cost savings, the ability to automate workflows, and more time back to the team to spend on mission-critical tasks.