The University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire (UWEC) is a public university serving thousands of undergraduate and graduate students across its Eau Claire, Wisconsin campus. The university's primary website is a central channel for reaching prospective students, current students, faculty, and the broader community.
UWEC came into the engagement knowing big changes were needed. Important messages for prospective students were getting lost in the noise, navigation and pathways to apply were confusing, and the university's brand was due for a refresh. At the same time, UWEC's team was actively questioning the long-term value of supporting a custom CMS and hosting the site internally. They had the talent and drive to make changes — but they wanted an outside partner to help shape the path forward. Electric Citizen engaged with UWEC first on a strategic review, then on a full site rebuild on Drupal that launched alongside a concurrent university rebrand.
About the project
Challenge
UWEC knew big changes were needed. Important content aimed at prospective students was being obscured by too many competing messages, navigation was confusing, and pathways to apply weren't clear. The university's brand itself was due for a refresh. Behind the scenes, UWEC's team was questioning the long-term value of continuing to support a custom CMS and host the site internally. They had strong in-house talent and ambition, but they also recognized they could benefit from outside help to shape strategy, design, and platform direction.
Solutions
Electric Citizen engaged first on an extensive strategic review using our "Foundation" discovery process. Through a series of workshops and audits — covering analytics, content modeling and moderation, design and UX, editorial experience, site performance, hosting and developer workflow, and SEO — we worked with UWEC through key decision points and delivered a full strategic brief with recommendations for the redesign to follow.
Building on that foundation, we partnered with UWEC on a full site rebuild that launched alongside a concurrent university rebrand. We worked closely with their marketing and communications team to review, rewrite, and retire content, redesign and simplify overall navigation with a clear focus on prospective students, and move internally-focused content to a separate intranet. UWEC led the brand refresh with its internal and partner teams; our role on the visual side was to consult, offer feedback, and contribute smaller design decisions throughout — and then to translate the new brand into a bold, modern, interactive site experience in Drupal.
On the technical side, we consulted with UWEC's development team on their existing custom CMS and recommended a move to Drupal. Our migration team mapped large volumes of existing pages and custom components from the old system to the new, minimizing manual work by leaning heavily on the Migrate suite. We also redefined and rebuilt the department's content tools in Drupal, implementing a component-based system using Layout Paragraphs and Layout Builder. Alongside the build, we delivered a full content playbook, content governance guidance, and ongoing content workshops with site editors, consulting with the marcomm team weekly as they worked through site-wide content revisions.
In UWEC's words:
"We had a partner who had our campus's best interests in mind at all times." — Rebecca Dienger, Director of Marketing
Outcomes
The rebuild launched in step with the university's refreshed brand, introducing a new look and feel to the wider UWEC community of students, faculty, and prospective students. The new site features a bold, vibrant visual identity, clearer site architecture, clearer user roles and responsibilities, and improved accessibility and performance. Electric Citizen continues to partner with UWEC post-launch on maintenance and site improvements, including a site-wide theme refresh to align with additional brand and marketing updates.
Why Drupal was chosen
UWEC had been running on a fully-functional, custom-built CMS maintained in-house. A core question at the start of the engagement was whether to keep investing in that custom system or move to a more widely supported platform. Both teams — UWEC's and ours — evaluated alternatives, including WordPress, before landing on Drupal as the right fit:
- Content scale and structure — A major university website spans academic programs, news, events, people directories, admissions, campus life, and more. Drupal's mature content modeling, taxonomy, and entity reference capabilities handle this kind of multi-audience site more cleanly than WordPress, which tends to require heavier customization to reach the same level of structure.
- Editorial flexibility — UWEC needed a component-based authoring model that gave marketing and communications staff control over page composition without custom development for every new layout. Drupal's contrib ecosystem — Paragraphs, Layout Builder, Layout Paragraphs — delivered this out of the box.
- Moving off a custom CMS — Continuing to maintain a one-of-a-kind CMS meant ongoing cost, limited documentation, and a narrow talent pool. Drupal is a widely supported open source platform with a large community and a long track record in higher education, which directly addressed UWEC's sustainability concerns.
- Sector fit — Drupal is broadly adopted across U.S. higher education, meaning proven patterns for university sites, people directories, and program pages, and a deep bench of agencies and developers who understand the space.
- Accessibility — A public university site has to meet a high accessibility bar. Drupal's accessibility-focused core and admin experience support sustained 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 university committed to a multi-year digital investment.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Moving off a custom CMS meant UWEC's editors needed a component-based authoring model that gave them control over page composition without custom development every time marketing priorities shifted. Paragraphs, Layout Paragraphs, and Layout Builder together give editors flexible, component-based pages and higher-level layout control — the foundation of a site UWEC's marcomm team can grow and adapt on their own. Media Library centralizes image and asset management across the site.
The migration off a custom, internally-built CMS was the heart of the technical work. The Migrate suite provided the scaffolding to move large volumes of pages and custom components from the old system into Drupal programmatically, minimizing manual re-entry. Pathauto and Redirect protected SEO equity and inbound links through the rebuild — critical for a university site that depends on strong search visibility for admissions.
As a prospective-student-facing site, UWEC also needed to be easy to find and easy to maintain. Metatag and Schema.org Metatag support SEO and structured data at scale. Site search is handled by an embedded Google Programmable Search Engine, keeping ongoing search infrastructure lightweight. The Gin admin theme rounds things out with a cleaner, more accessible editing experience for the team managing the site day to day.
