UChicagoCollege Admissions

Problem

The University of Chicago's College Admissions site had gone eight years without a full overhaul. Built on Drupal, it had accumulated years of well-intentioned additions — extra subpages, over-explained content, and a structure that made simple updates feel like archaeology. Beyond the user experience, the platform itself was becoming a liability: Drupal talent was increasingly scarce and expensive, making it difficult to hire or grow the team sustainably. The site needed more than a refresh. It needed a rethink.

Decision

I evaluated several platform combinations before proposing a modern JAMstack architecture: Gatsby.js, React, Contentful, and Netlify, with a GitHub-managed workflow. I made the case to leadership and key stakeholders — presenting not just technical merits but the long-term strategic value of building on a stack where developer talent is abundant and the content editing experience is genuinely usable by non-technical staff. The decision wasn't made in a vacuum; it required earning buy-in. Once approved, I led a cross-functional team of designers, a developer, and content writers through both a complete visual redesign and a substantial content reduction — taking the site from 246 pages down to 141.

Outcome

The rebuilt site is significantly faster, visually modernized, and far easier to maintain. Cutting nearly 100 pages forced a discipline around content that the old site had lost — what remained is cleaner and more purposeful. The new stack has delivered on the hiring front as well, making it meaningfully easier to recruit React-fluent talent. Perhaps most importantly, the content team now has genuine ownership of the site; updates that previously required developer involvement can be handled directly in Contentful.