We started the project with three challenges:

• A redesigned website had to better reflect the spirit of the place and also guide prospective students to explore and ultimately take action. 
• The university needed to create a more consistent brand experience across its individual school sites. 
• And the Drupal 7 web content management system they’d been relying on was reaching end of life; migrating to the latest version of Drupal had to factor in a dramatically new technical architecture.
   

The insights we gathered through our Discovery process made it clear that USF is an attractive choice for prospective students who want to develop skills and connections for a fast-changing world — and who want something bigger than that, too; the focus on justice was key. The close relationships between faculty and students, the sense of community and an exciting, diverse city were also draws. The site had to communicate these differentiators in an authentic, uniquely USF way.

From our research, we created robust guidelines for message and voice, along with strategic guidance on how to tell the USF story page by page. Paired with the expression of the school's ethos, these showed communicators how to talk about USF as a center for discovery and a force for positive change, and paint a picture of the real-world student experience at USF and its impact on student outcomes. 

Focusing the message meant reducing the bloat that so many higher ed websites suffer from. We streamlined thousands of pages of sprawling content, created a clean and logical site architecture, and made sure that user flows directed our key audiences to each next step on their journeys, while still amplifying the “why.”

USF is made up of five different schools, with each owning its own child site until the school centralized website support services in 2019. While the university had taken steps to centralize web content, each school still had dedicated web producers who answered only to that school’s dean. To create a consistent experience that served USF’s objectives, we had to create a system for the schools that would still offer them the autonomy they were used to.

In our Drupal 9 architecture, we transitioned from Panels to Paragraphs, as Paragraphs offer a more flexible and modular approach to content creation. This shift allowed for better management of reusable components and a more streamlined editing experience. By implementing a Pattern Lab–based component approach, we empowered each of the five schools within the university to create custom page layouts that catered to their specific needs, while maintaining a cohesive design language across the entire website.

Knowing the complex process that goes into getting a single site successfully launched, our team knew it would be no small feat to launch all five sites along with the main website on one highly anticipated launch day. This reality demanded careful collaboration with the USF core web team to ensure that countless stakeholders were getting all the tools they needed, and were happy with the design of the new platform.

True to the determination and positive energy of the school, all teams pulled together to reach big success for a 6-way launch day.

Our process also gave USF better analytics tools to understand their new marketing platform’s effectiveness. We helped USF bring data from both website activity and Admissions systems into a single dashboard—a first for the school, and often an elusive goal at universities where data is siloed and tightly held. By pulling in all the data that matters, this comprehensive reporting offers managers a snapshot from a wider landscape—laying the groundwork for optimization that measurably impacts enrollment results.

In early reporting, these numbers were decidedly up by double digits in both undergraduate and graduate applications.