The Josef Korbel School of Global & Public Affairs at the University of Denver ranks among the best schools of its kind in the world. Its website didn't say so, and its own team couldn't change it. Here's how we fixed both.
The Josef Korbel School of Global & Public Affairs, a globally ranked graduate and undergraduate school at the University of Denver.
A complicated Drupal build that no longer fit the school's needs. Routine updates required developer time, and the site's structure buried the programs students came to find.
Redesigned the site around its real audiences and rebuilt it on WordPress, with custom roles that let each research center manage its own section inside the brand.
Same school, same rankings, same mission. What changed is how fast a visitor can see all of that and act on it.
The old homepage on the left, the new one on the right.
The site had outgrown the platform underneath it.
If you lead a school or a nonprofit, this story will sound familiar. The website started out fine. Then years of additions piled up, every department got a section, and the structure came to mirror the org chart instead of the people the site exists to serve.
Korbel's Drupal build had reached that point. It was complicated in the way legacy Drupal sites often are: powerful in theory, but in practice every small change routed through a developer. For a communications team that needed to post events, publish faculty news, and keep program pages current through every admissions cycle, that's a constant tax on the mission.
Meanwhile the school itself kept climbing the rankings. The gap between the institution and its website got wider every year.
Our job wasn't to talk them into more technology. It was the opposite. We moved them to WordPress, a platform their own staff could run, and spent the design effort where it counts: making sure a 17-year-old comparing programs, a donor, and a prospective graduate student could each find their path in a click or two.
What changed depends on who you ask. A redesign serves three constituencies at once. Here's what each one got.
The old homepage asked visitors to hunt. The new one puts every degree area on the first screen, from International Security to Public Policy, with clean paths for undergraduates and graduate applicants.
A persistent "Request more info" action follows visitors through the site, so the moment curiosity peaks, the school is one click from a conversation. News and events now read like a living institution rather than an archive.
The move from Drupal to WordPress means the people responsible for the content actually control the content. Events, faculty news, program updates, and landing pages all get published by staff, in an editor that behaves like the tools they already use.
Korbel also runs research centers, each with its own team and its own corner of the site. We built custom user roles for them: center staff manage their own pages and publish their own news, and the permissions stop right at the brand guidelines. Nobody can wander off with the fonts, the colors, or the layout.
That's the balance most schools never get. The dean's office stopped being a bottleneck, and it never gave up control of the brand. Training and documentation came standard, like they do with every build.
Universities keep websites a long time. This build is made for that: an open-source platform with a massive talent pool behind it, security hardened to OWASP standards, and a migration handled carefully so existing links and search visibility carried over.
No proprietary lock-in, no platform bill that climbs every year, and no single vendor holding the keys. Korbel owns its site.
Most prospective students will only ever see this version. They shop for schools on their phones, and the old mobile experience was a shrunken desktop site. The new one was designed for the thumb first.
How a migration like this actually goes. Committees, brand standards, accessibility requirements, and a site that can't go dark mid-semester: we've run this play for schools, districts, and nonprofits since 2002, and the sequence looks like this.
We work with schools, universities, and nonprofits that need a site their own team can run, their board can be proud of, and their audiences can actually use. Tell us what's not working. We'll listen first. It's kind of our thing.
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