University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES)
A scalable .edu foundation for research, education, and outreach
OVERVIEW
For 65+ years, UMCES has advised the state and federal leaders shaping the future of the Chesapeake Bay, run research stations across seven Maryland locations, and trained the next generation of environmental scientists. But their website hadn’t kept pace with their mission, falling short of the caliber of the research and people behind it.
We partnered with UMCES to rebuild the institution’s aging, sprawling Drupal 7 site on a modern WordPress platform to serve prospective students, researchers, media, donors, and policymakers with equal clarity, and to give UMCES’s own communications team room to grow for years to come.
KEY OUTCOMES & WINS
- A full D7 to WordPress platform migration, with zero disruption to UMCES’s decade of published content
- Compliance with FERPA and Maryland Higher Education privacy requirements built directly into the site’s architecture
- A custom, AJAX-powered expert directory with advanced search and filtering by campus, research area, and job title
- Seamless Constant Contact and Google Analytics integrations for ongoing communications and measurement
- A component-based design system that gives UMCES’s content team the flexibility to build new pages and stories without custom development
PAIN POINTS & CHALLENGES
UMCES’s legacy site had accumulated more than a decade of content, structure, and workarounds, and it was starting to show.
- The content ecosystem had become too complex to navigate — 10,000+ items spanning news, research publications, staff profiles, and media were spread across 14 legacy content types with inconsistent structure, making information hard to find, tag, and maintain.
- Different audiences had a wide array of needs & expectations — Prospective students, active researchers, journalists, donors, and policymakers each come to umces.edu looking for something different, and the existing architecture wasn’t built to serve any of them particularly well.
- The legacy platform was holding their teams back — The outdated CMS limited what UMCES’s content editors could do day to day and put long-term maintainability, security, and compliance at risk.
SOLUTIONS: STRATEGY MEETS PERFORMANCE
Grounding the Redesign in Real Research
Before creating the client’s new personas, information architecture, and page templates, we ran a full discovery phase built around UMCES’s internal and external audiences to prioritize competing needs and confirm where current industry best practices held up — and where this project called for a different approach.
Migrating a Decade of Content Without Losing a Thing
The technical core of this project was scale. We mapped, restructured, and migrated 10,000+ content items across 14 legacy content types into nine purpose-built custom post types, including:
- 4,600+ news articles, preserving UMCES’s long history of institutional storytelling
- 576 research publications with PDF downloads intact
- 529 staff directory profiles migrated and standardized for the new expert directory
Surfacing UMCES’s Experts and Their Research
One of the most requested features from UMCES’s own team was a better way to connect visitors with the right expert. We built a custom, AJAX-powered directory that lets users filter UMCES’s scientists and staff by campus, research area, and job title in real time, turning their staff list into a discovery tool for journalists, prospective collaborators, and students.
Integrating Compliance and Connection From the Ground Up
Because UMCES operates within the University of Maryland system, the new site needed to meet FERPA and Maryland Higher Education privacy requirements from day one, not bolted on after launch. We built that compliance into the architecture itself, alongside full DNS and SSL migration, a Google Analytics integration for ongoing measurement, and a seamless Constant Contact integration so UMCES’s communications team can keep growing its email audience directly from the new site.
