Sector(s)
Team Members
The Minnesota Office of Higher Education (OHE) connects students and families across the state to financial aid, scholarships, and the information they need to make college possible. Its flagship website serves more than 31,000 visits a month across a wide range of audiences — students, families, education professionals, policymakers, and the general public.
The existing site had grown difficult to use and difficult to maintain. Navigation was confusing, the design was dated and inaccessible, mobile performance lagged, and the underlying Cold Fusion platform lacked a true content management system for staff. OHE, in partnership with Minnesota IT Services (MNIT), engaged Electric Citizen to lead the redesign, rebuild, and content migration.
About the project
Challenge
OHE's flagship website was the department's primary communication vehicle, but it was no longer serving its audience. Navigation was confusing, the design was dated and inaccessible, mobile performance lagged, and staff had no real CMS — the entire site ran on a legacy Cold Fusion platform with more than 800 pages and 5,000 PDFs behind it. The State needed a partner to lead a full redesign and rebuild on Drupal, migrate years of legacy content, and hand off a platform OHE could manage and grow on its own.
Solutions
Electric Citizen led the engagement through strategy, UX, design, and development. We reviewed existing navigation against audience needs, conducted user testing to validate a simplified information architecture, and built on Minnesota's state branding guidelines to introduce a warmer, calmer visual design suited to content-heavy pages. On the technical side, our team led discovery, defined editorial requirements, migrated content off Cold Fusion, and trained OHE's in-house developer in Drupal best practices and dev-ops workflows so the team could take over ongoing maintenance at launch.
Outcomes
Post-launch measurement showed clear gains across engagement and performance:
- 19% increase in pages per session
- 8% increase in average engagement time
- 6% increase in form submissions
- 23% improvement in mobile performance
The new Drupal site has also won multiple design awards since launch, and the CMS now gives OHE staff the control and sustainability they need to evolve the site alongside the needs of Minnesota students and families.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was specified by the State of Minnesota as the target platform for the rebuild, reflecting its established role across Minnesota state agency websites. It was a strong fit for the project for several reasons:
- Content scale and structure — With 800+ HTML pages and 5,000+ PDFs covering financial aid, loans, scholarships, and regulatory information, OHE needed a CMS with mature content modeling, taxonomy, and search. Drupal handles content-heavy sites like this well out of the box.
- Editorial empowerment — The previous Cold Fusion environment offered no real CMS. Drupal gave OHE staff a modern authoring experience with roles, workflow, and reusable components so they could maintain the site independently after launch.
- Accessibility — As the department's primary communication vehicle, the site had to meet a high accessibility bar. Drupal's accessibility-focused core and admin experience support ongoing WCAG compliance.
- Open source and sustainability — No licensing costs, a large contributor community, and a clear long-term roadmap made Drupal a sustainable choice for a public agency with a multi-year horizon.
- Sector fit — Drupal is widely adopted across U.S. state and local government and higher education, which meant proven patterns for multi-audience sites, future phases and knowledge transfer to OHE's in-house developer.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
OHE had never had a true CMS, so a central goal was giving staff a flexible but manageable authoring experience. Paragraphs, Layout Builder, and Media Library together gave editors component-based pages, higher-level layout control where it was needed, and a single place to manage embedded media — the foundation of a site staff could grow on their own.
Migrating off Cold Fusion was a significant undertaking given the volume of legacy content. The Migrate suite provided the scaffolding to move structured content into Drupal programmatically, while a portion of the content was reviewed and re-entered manually so the team could clean up and modernize it as part of the move. Pathauto and Redirect protected SEO equity and inbound links across that transition.
As the department's primary communication vehicle, the site also had to be easy to find, easy to search, and easy to maintain. Metatag and Schema.org Metatag support SEO and structured data at scale. With 800+ pages and 5,000+ PDFs to surface, site search is handled by Search API and Search API Solr against a hosted SearchStax Solr backend — giving OHE fast, relevant search without the operational overhead of self-hosting Solr. The Gin admin theme rounds things out with a cleaner, more accessible editing experience for staff managing the site day to day.
