Harvard College, the undergraduate admissions and financial aid division of Harvard University, partnered with Mediacurrent to refresh their digital presence in alignment with updated print materials, without the time and expense of a complete redesign.
The challenge was significant: modernize a prestigious institutional website to resonate with today's high school students while maintaining Harvard's tradition and seriousness. The site needed to feel both approachable and authoritative, incorporate modern content formats like TikTok, and improve wayfinding through dense information architecture, all within a constrained timeline.
The refresh needed to modernize the site's look and feel to better resonate with
high school students, Harvard College's primary audience, while maintaining the
institution's sense of tradition and prestige. This included incorporating social
media content like TikTok videos to showcase student life in formats familiar to
younger audiences.
Harvard College also wanted to humanize the institution's digital presence, making Harvard feel accessible and welcoming to diverse prospective students who might assume "it's not for me." The project aimed to counter common misconceptions about affordability and exclusivity by bringing authentic student stories and faces to the forefront of the website.
Improved wayfinding was another critical goal. Student focus groups revealed that while the site wasn't fundamentally broken, its density made it difficult for users to find needed information. The team needed to surface key pathways and answers more effectively without overwhelming visitors.
From a technical and editorial perspective, Harvard wanted to modernize efficiently without the disruption of a complete rebuild. The goal was to refresh the site in a way that allowed content editors to migrate to new designs gradually, at their own pace, without re-entering content or breaking existing pages.
Finally, Harvard aimed to create a scalable storytelling platform that could evolve continuously rather than requiring massive redesigns every five to seven years. The refresh approach needed to establish a foundation for ongoing incremental improvements informed by both qualitative and quantitative data.
Harvard College has relied on Drupal for over a decade, and this refresh project reinforced why Drupal remains the optimal platform for their complex institutional needs. When faced with the choice between migrating to a new CMS, rebuilding from scratch, or refreshing strategically, Drupal's flexibility made the efficient refresh approach possible.
Drupal's component-based architecture was essential to the project's success. The platform allowed the team to introduce modern design elements and new components while preserving existing content and functionality. This meant Harvard could modernize without the massive resource drain of re-entering content or rebuilding hundreds of pages.
A key technical requirement was the ability to let content editors gradually adopt new designs at their own pace. Drupal's flexibility enabled the development of toggle features within components, allowing editors to switch between traditional and 2024 designs with a simple checkbox. This approach reduced risk, minimized disruption, and gave the editorial team control over the transition timeline.
For an institution serving multiple audiences—prospective students, their families, guidance counselors, current students—with diverse content needs and strict editorial workflows, Drupal provided the stability to maintain a robust foundation while enabling continuous evolution. The platform supports Harvard's new model of incremental improvements rather than disruptive redesigns every five to seven years.
Drupal's proven scalability and security were also critical factors for a high-profile institution like Harvard College, where reliability and performance are non-negotiable.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Custom component-based theme: A key requirement was not to start from scratch with new code, but to make methodical improvements to the existing theme. Several new components were written and old ones were enhanced, but no major contrib packages were added.
Custom teasers module: The theme previously used several types of paragraph entities that displayed slightly different layouts of node previews (“cards”), and the refreshed design called for even more to be added. These were consolidated into a single new “Teasers” paragraph type supported by a custom module. Editors may now choose a layout from a list and populate it from a View, from a hand-curated list of nodes, or by manually typing the content into fields.
