What This Transformation Delivers
Foundational systems that modernize how we build, manage and improve our web presence
- Insight-Driven Content & Platform Oversight: Enterprise use of Siteimprove to evaluate accessibility, SEO, content quality and web infrastructure while providing continuous diagnostics that guide content strategy, compliance and ongoing improvement.
- A Unified Design System: A new design system that standardizes visual language, interaction patterns and accessibility across rice.edu while ensuring consistency, brand alignment and faster, more sustainable development.
- A Modern Enterprise CMS: Adoption of Storyblok, a headless content management system that replaces Drupal, empowers content teams, supports structured content and enables faster performance and future-ready digital experiences.
Governance: Siteimprove
Accessibility and quality assurance must become continuous and measurable rather than episodic and reactive.
- Continuous quality monitoring: Automatically detect accessibility issues, broken links and content regressions early.
- Clear ownership & remediation: Assign issues to responsible owners, track fixes over time and enforce standard thresholds and SLAs.
- Visibility & accountability: Dashboards give leadership and units a shared view of site health and performance.
- Built-in prevention: Recurring checks during build, launch and publishing make quality a routine practice—not a last-minute scramble.
Together, these practices make web quality proactive—finding issues early, reducing risk and maintaining an accessible, high-quality web presence.
Visit siteimprove.com to learn more.
Design Partner: American Eagle
American Eagle accelerates redesign and migration, while Public Affairs retains ownership of standards, governance and long-term evolution.
American Eagle’s focus will include:
- Page archetypes: consistent landing/detail/directory/story patterns for reuse
- UX quality: reduced cognitive strain via cleaner hierarchy, simpler choice architecture
- Implementation acceleration: reusable templates and component patterns for scale
- Accessibility integration: accessible-by-default layout and interaction patterns
The goal is not a one-time redesign but a reusable system: design patterns and governance that surpass any single vendor engagement or technology cycle.
CMS Upgrade: Storyblok
Drupal remains important as a bridge for continuity and risk reduction, but it is no longer the strategic center of gravity. Drupal: sustainment-only posture during migration; limit net-new custom expansion.
NEW:
- Storyblok: default platform for new builds, migrations and content model standardization
- Editorial scale: visual editing + componentized authoring for non-technical contributors
- Structured content: reusable models support SEO, accessibility and AI-readiness
Visit storyblok.com to learn more.
Content Debt: Lifecycle Strategy
Content debt is the most underestimated cost in higher-ed web operations: outdated pages, duplicated information and trivial content create user confusion and reputational risk.
WHAT WE ASK YOU TO HELP WITH:
- Inventory: establish page lists, owners, analytics signals and lifecycle status
- ROT reduction: remove redundant/outdated/trivial content and consolidate duplicates
- Lifecycle controls: review dates, ownership assignment and sunsetting workflows
- Learn/Use monitoring (Site Improve) and CMS structure to prevent “publish-and-forget”
Modernization must include a disciplined approach to auditing, reducing and preventing content debt—otherwise the new platform inherits old problems.
Development & Communications Timeline (proposed)
A phased approach to build, validate and launch a sustainable enterprise web platform