Crafting a Joyful, Accessible, and Unified Digital Experience

Fragmented to unified: A complete transformation

Smith College partnered with Four Kitchens to modernize its sprawling Drupal 7 environment — over 30,000 pages spread across three major sites — into a streamlined, accessible, and sustainable digital experience built on Drupal 10. The project addressed accessibility violations, outdated interfaces, and fragmented branding, resulting in a single multisite platform that’s both easy to manage and delightful to use.

Overview

For more than 150 years, Smith College has offered a world-class undergraduate and graduate-level education to women interested in solving society’s complex, urgent problems. Enrolling 2,600 students from nearly every state and more than 50 countries, Smith prides itself on developing a global community of scholars, entrepreneurs, scientists, activists and humanitarians who are changing the world.

Despite its storied reputation, the college’s online presence no longer effectively reflected its dynamic, inclusive, and forward-thinking community. Facing the impending Drupal 7 end-of-life, Smith College recognized an urgent need to reimagine their digital platform. They partnered with us to transform their fragmented, outdated website into an engaging, accessible, and cohesive digital experience that truly represents the spirit of Smith College.

This collaboration was much more than a technical upgrade. Together, we unified three major sites, migrated a decade’s worth of content, and empowered Smith’s editors with modern, flexible tools. We also dramatically improved performance and accessibility, creating a digital experience that’s not only easier to manage — it’s more joyful, inclusive, and future-ready.

The challenge

Smith College’s digital landscape had become increasingly fragmented over the years. Their main Drupal 7 website had ballooned to more than 30,000 pages, creating substantial management challenges, maintenance overhead, and inconsistencies. Compounding these issues, two centerpieces of the campus experience, The Smith College Libraries and The Botanic Garden, had branched out onto separate platforms, leading to inconsistent branding and user experiences.

Beyond fragmentation, the site suffered from critical accessibility violations, poor performance metrics, and outdated user interfaces that negatively impacted user engagement and search visibility. The lack of mobile responsiveness and reliance on cumbersome HTML editing processes further compounded content creation and management frustrations. Smith’s digital presence required a dramatic, unified solution to overcome these challenges and better serve students, staff, alumni, and prospective community members.

The solution: A unified and empowering approach

We partnered closely with Smith to develop a platform that would be joyful to use, accessible by design, and scalable for years to come. Our work spanned architecture, design, development, governance, and editorial strategy — all grounded in deep collaboration and a shared vision.

Embracing joy through flexible design

From the outset, joy and inclusivity defined our creative approach. Leveraging our open-source design system, Emulsify, we developed a robust, component-based architecture that offered significant creative flexibility.

Caption: Smith College’s website design system

To further support flexibility, we introduced a dynamic theming system. Editors can assign unique themes at the section, page, or component level — each drawing from a broad color palette and driven by CSS custom properties. This allowed content creators to shape pages that feel playful and distinctive while maintaining Smith's cohesive brand identity.

This design flexibility empowered departments to create rich, expressive layouts — whether for the Libraries, the Botanic Garden, or a spontaneous homepage takeover celebrating the basketball team’s Final Four appearance.

Prioritizing accessibility

Accessibility was central to our redesign strategy. We rigorously tested keyboard navigation, screen-reader compatibility, and color contrast compliance for each component. Using automated accessibility tests integrated within our Storybook component library, we proactively identified and resolved potential issues.

The result was transformative: Smith’s new site reduced “critical” accessibility violations from 304 to only two prior to launch, ultimately achieving a Lighthouse accessibility score of 100. This dramatic improvement ensured that Smith’s digital presence was not only inclusive, but also set a benchmark in higher education website accessibility.

Empowering content editors

We worked with Smith to overhaul the content creation experience — replacing clunky, manual workflows with modern, intuitive tools. Editors can now preview, customize, and publish content seamlessly, all within a single interface. The result? A streamlined process that turned skeptical stakeholders into enthusiastic advocates for the new system.

A visual editing experience editors love

We replaced manual, HTML-heavy workflows with an intuitive interface powered by Paragraphs and Paragraphs Editor Enhancements. Each paragraph component was configured with custom preview modes wired directly to the frontend theme, giving editors real-time, true-to-design previews as they built content.

Smart permissions and governance

We implemented a domain-based permission system, allowing editors to manage content specific to their assigned subdomains. Department leads had full control over their sections, while student contributors had limited access. Media assets are curated and moderated before being shared across domains to help maintain quality and consistency.

Streamlining a complex migration

From 45 content types to 11

Smith’s Drupal 7 architecture included more than 45 content types, 20 taxonomy vocabularies, and a mix of layout strategies including Panels and custom Bootstrap markup. It lacked a centralized media library, which made reuse and governance a challenge. We audited the entire content model and streamlined it to 11 content types, 12 taxonomies, and 30 paragraph types — reducing complexity while preserving flexibility.

Automated at scale

Migrating over 30,000 content nodes presented significant complexity given the large number of legacy content types. To streamline the process, we evaluated pages with similar structure and purpose, consolidating them into 11 strategically defined content types. This thoughtful grouping enabled the automation of approximately 90% of the migration effort, significantly reducing the need for manual cleanup.

Multisite publishing on a single platform

We consolidated Smith.edu, the Libraries, and the Botanic Garden into a single Drupal instance using Domain Access. Each retained autonomy and branding while sharing a unified codebase — simplifying updates, permissions, and long-term maintenance.

Community-centric digital experience

Community storytelling became the heart of Smith’s redesigned digital platform. Their new homepage now prominently features rotating profiles of students, faculty, staff, and alumnae, celebrating the diverse and inclusive spirit of the Smith community.

Their emphasis on people gave the platform soul, helping visitors see themselves in the Smith experience.

Two mobile screenshots side-by-side

Enhancing performance

The new website significantly boosted performance and user experience. Lighthouse performance scores increased from problematic levels to an impressive score of 95, demonstrating substantial improvements:

TABLE OF PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS

These enhancements delivered faster page load times and significantly improved site responsiveness, positively impacting user satisfaction and retention.

Intuitive, user-centric navigation

Working closely with Smith’s internal teams, we restructured the site’s navigation around clear, intuitive user journeys. Primary and secondary navigation improvements drastically enhanced discoverability and ease of use. Users now navigate the site effortlessly, quickly finding relevant information through simplified dropdown menus and clearly indicated user pathways.

Results and impact

The data

• Site traffic, engagement, and user retention all increased significantly
• A Lighthouse accessibility score of 100 and an overall performance score of 95
• 30,000 pieces of content migrated, 90% of which were handled automatically

How it helped their team

• Unified digital voice: ​​Consolidation under a single digital strategy significantly reduced management complexity and enhanced brand consistency
• Empowered editors: Intuitive backend experience and robust content workflows converted previously skeptical editors into active advocates of the new system
• Creative flexibility: Editors leveraged new tools to rapidly create responsive, engaging content, such as celebrating the Smith basketball team’s Final Four achievement with a homepage transformation

Details

Services provided

• Accessibility compliance and testing
• UX design and visual design
• Design system and component library creation using Emulsify
• Frontend and backend development
• Automated content migration
• Content strategy and information architecture
• Documentation, training, and stakeholder support
• Integration with third-party systems like CourseLeaf and 25Live

Technologies used

• Drupal
• CKEditor 5
• Emulsify design system: component development and accessibility testing
• Paragraphs and Paragraphs Editor Enhancements: structured content and live previews
• Domain Access: multisite content management and permissions
• Feeds: import course data from CourseLeaf and events from 25Live
• GitHub Actions: CI/CD workflows

Looking ahead: Scalability, sustainability, and community

The Smith College redesign showcases what’s possible when technical vision meets editorial empowerment. This platform isn’t just future-ready — it’s people-ready, too.

The successful launch of the new Smith College website demonstrates the power of thoughtful, scalable digital innovation. It positions Smith for ongoing cost savings, operational efficiencies, continuous performance improvements, and sustained community engagement. Most importantly, Smith’s new site serves as a dynamic digital reflection of its vibrant, diverse community — continuously evolving to meet their needs. As Smith’s internal announcement stated, “We hope you love the new site as much as we do.” Judging by the enthusiastic response, it’s clear the community wholeheartedly does.