Website Transformation and Content Audit
Heavy Drupal lift and cleaning out the closet.
Role: Public Affairs Specialist -> Web Communications Manager
USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) had been in Drupal 7 for several years. When I arrived to the agency in March 2021, the department was in the middle of the "Website Modernization Initiative" which saw the modernization of many USDA agency websites. Together with the then Web Communications Manager, and then later in that same role, we worked to migrate our site from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 and then conduct a massive content audit.
The Challenge
The site had grown organically over many years. Duplicate content cannibalized search rankings, and a thoroughly decentralized governance model made it difficult to make any coherent push toward a unified structure. Additionally, NIFA was gutted during the 2019 relocation from D.C. to Kansas City, and the agency suffered a massive loss of institutional knowledge. We worked with the staff left to revamp the site and set new priorities.
The Approach
We worked with developers as part of the USDA-level Website Modernization Initiative to establish new content types, improve site navigation, combine content, and migrate existing configurations. We also developed a new governance model that was based around our org structure, but ensured that content went through multiple rounds of review before making it on the site. After the migration, we built a page-level scoring rubric to prioritize what to retire, revise, or keep. This was a huge effort that took many months due to the necessity of subject matter expert review. I worked extensively with content owners to prioritize the removal of old content and encourage them that not every PDF from 2004 is essential.
The Outcome
To say the migration was rocky would be a masterclass in understatement. Ultimately what we ended up with was greatly improved from what we had before, but we were very aware there was more work to be done. We established our new governance model, and I spearheaded the task of training new Drupal users on how to edit and publish content. We remapped all of our content to the new model and ensured a notification workflow was in place to make content approvals move as seamlessly as possible. I oversaw the content audit in 2023 which led to a decrease of 60% of our website footprint. Many webpages which had not been updated since 2015 (some had no record of being updated since 2008), and PDFs which had not been touched in two decades were finally put to rest. Ultimately, through our web modernization effort and the content audit, we observed a 23% increase in traffic to our key Funding Opportunity pages and a 6% increase in our site-wide engagement rate.
Key Highlights
- Led the Drupal 7 to Drupal 9 migration for a USDA agency site, then managed post-launch remediation to stabilize the platform
- Built a new content governance model, trained agency staff on Drupal publishing workflows, and ran a content audit that cut the site footprint by 60%
- Drove measurable gains after modernization and cleanup: 23% increase in traffic to key Funding Opportunity pages and a 6% lift in site-wide engagement
Interested in working together?
I am currently open to senior content strategy and editorial leadership roles.
Get in touch