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Nick Walkowicz
(Case study 04)
Sector
Private liberal arts college
Focus
Content audit, IA, content strategy, governance
Scope
1,267-page sitemap · 6 templates · 22 widgets
Timeline
2023–2025
Agency
Primacy

From 105 front doors to six.

Re-architecting a private liberal arts college’s sprawling web presence — nearly 120,000 crawled URLs across 89 subdomains — into a clear, story-led site built to help prospective students say yes.

105 TOP-LEVEL PAGESBeforeAcademicsAdmissionStudent ExperienceAboutParentsGiving6 SECTIONS27 → 181 → …
Fig. 1Before: 105 pages competing at the top level. After: six sections, 27 second-level and 181 third-level pages, in a structure 1,267 pages deep.
(By the numbers)
119,670URLs crawled across 89 subdomains
105 → 6top-level pages consolidated into sections
1,267pages in the new sitemap
1,382legacy URLs mapped to new homes or redirects
§ 1 · The challenge

A web presence that had outgrown its structure.

A full crawl found 119,670 URLs across 89 subdomains — 71 of them blogs — including 36,770 redirects and 2,423 broken links. Thousands of PDFs and office documents stood in for web pages, and 105 pages competed for attention at the top level of navigation.

On the pages that mattered most, the problems were plain: 38% of priority pages read as fairly hard to very hard, local navigation didn’t match the site’s structure, and key paths dead-ended. The apply page had the lowest engagement rate of any top page, at 34%.¹

3,198PDFs linked from 2,272 pages
25%of indexable URLs shared a duplicate title
38%of priority pages rated hard to read

Findings from the site crawl, file crawl, and priority-page audit.

§ 2 · Strategy

Show, don’t tell.

The experience brief reframed the site around one idea: show prospective students how they would get more out of college, rather than telling them. Six imperatives guided the work, and five perception shifts defined what the site had to change.

  1. i.Show, don’t tell.
  2. ii.Sophisticated simplification.
  3. iii.Clear navigation from any entry point.
  4. iv.Your experience, your way.
  5. v.Demonstrate the return on investment.
  6. vi.Be brave, but deliver the basics.
Perception shifts
  • Rural→Close to the metro
  • Expensive→A proven return
  • Exclusive→A place to belong
  • A career network→A life network
  • Little known→A hidden gem
§ 3 · Architecture

Six sections instead of 105 front doors.

The new sitemap organizes 1,267 pages under six top-level sections, with every legacy URL mapped to a new home or a redirect. Hundreds of thin pages were consolidated into richer ones instead of being migrated as-is.

Level 16
Level 227
Level 3181
Level 4218
Level 5623
Level 6191
Level 721

Pages per level in the new sitemap. The top three levels carry the navigation; deeper levels hold detail.

§ 4 · Content system

A kit the college’s team can actually use.

Six page templates and 22 widgets give authors a flexible kit — including an interest-based program finder and a taxonomy-driven feed that surfaces related stories, news, and events automatically. Every existing page was triaged with one question: is it web-ready?

Is it web-ready?
Yes →Map itNo →DeleteSplitMergeEdit
Four stages, twelve steps per page
  1. Foundation
  2. Ideation
  3. Mapping
  4. Migration
§ 5 · Governance

Clear roles keep a big site healthy.

A role-based model separates who can submit, write, approve, and publish. Anyone on campus can submit an event; subject-matter approvers publish within their own sections; a central team owns taxonomy, navigation, and user access.

  • Events submitterAnyone with a campus login; submits, can’t publish
  • Events coordinatorManages the shared calendar
  • Contributor / authorDrafts and edits; can’t publish
  • Contributor / tech supportTechnical help for authors
  • ApproverSection subject experts; reviews and publishesPublishes
  • Owner / adminCentral team; taxonomy, navigation, usersPublishes

Post-launch performance data will be added as it becomes available.

(Next case study)Thirty-seven entities, one front door→