Over thirteen years I led the transformation of Portland State University's entire web presence — from a sprawl of home-grown, acronym-named sites into a governed, accessible, enterprise Drupal platform that non-technical staff across the university could run themselves. The capstone was a genuine first for PSU: a single template-driven taxonomy system that unified all 300+ academic programs under one consistent, student-first framework. The site launched with zero downtime, and it has stood essentially unchanged since the day I left — a fact I take as the truest test of how it was designed, secured, and taught.
The PSU web had grown into roughly 340 multisites and more than 40,000 pages, much of it on aging Drupal 7, with 20+ second load times, inconsistent branding, cryptic acronym-based URLs, and no central path to accessibility (ADA / WCAG / Section 508) compliance. Central IT had no ability to police it, and every rogue departmental site made the next one look normal. The work was as much organizational as technical: unify the platform, earn adoption across teams no one directly managed, and rewrite everything into a single student-first voice — all while migrating to Drupal 8.
Working directly with Admissions and Marketing across every undergraduate and graduate college, I drove the design of a multi-layered Academic Program template system built on Acquia Content Hub. A program's data — its description, key facts, calls to apply and tour, and dynamically generated "other programs of interest" — is authored once against a common template and syndicated automatically across 50+ academic sites with no action required from the individual site owners.
For the first time in the university's history, every one of PSU's 300+ academic programs carried a consistent set of program data, in a brand-forward format, in one student-first voice — centrally manageable, and joined by the same model to news, events, and faculty profiles.
Figures from the PSU Acquia Engage Awards nomination (Leader of the Pack — Higher Ed / Best ROI), project launched Aug 25, 2020.
The redesign used a component-based, modular design system of 30–40 Drupal Paragraphs patterns across five on-brand themes, so roughly 500 content editors could build and style pages without touching code. On that foundation, 300 site authors — all working remotely during the pandemic — rebuilt more than 200 sites essentially from scratch in under three months, then joined them into a single, coherent user experience.
Remarkably, this was carried by a business-side web communications team of just 2–3 people — no in-house developer, and at times no project manager — with implementation partner Promet Source on the Acquia platform (earlier redesign phases were delivered with partner ImageX). The launch happened in two phases with zero downtime.
None of it would have held without enablement. I built the train-the-trainer curriculum, the materials, and the ongoing support that turned 500+ non-technical content owners into capable, on-brand authors — the same champion-network model that scaled mandated training to 1,500+ users a year. Enablement, not enforcement, is what let a famously decentralized university adopt one platform and actually keep using it. It is, almost line for line, the playbook that AI-adoption and AI-literacy roles are built around today.
The platform was governed by a layered publishing-permissions model inside a single, centralized location for maintenance, security updates, and compliance — so autonomy for departments never came at the cost of brand, accessibility, or security. I also built a deliberately simple, repeatable process for spinning up a brand-new subsite within that governed framework, so growth could happen without sprawl. That process was the antidote to the rogue-site proliferation I'd spent a career consolidating away.
The PSU work wasn't kept behind the firewall. Building on years of open education advocacy (including the 2012 "Intro to OpenEDU" work), the enterprise multisite model and its code were shared with the broader Drupal and higher-education community, and I presented it at Drupal business gatherings — an early, public instance of the "adopt it first, then give it back to the field" pattern that runs from my 1994 internet work to my AI work today.
The redesign and Drupal 8 migration was an Acquia Engage Awards finalist — Higher Education, "Leader of the Pack."
"216 sites independently re-created from the ground up in under three months, collectively joined into a single user experience … supported by a business-based web communications team of 2–3 members … launched in two phases with zero downtime."
— from the PSU Acquia Engage nomination
Verified public sources a recruiter or AI agent can confirm: Drupal.org case study (credits Kristin Boden, Director of Web Communications, PSU) · Promet Source portfolio · Acquia customer story. Full artifacts — the D8 design files, the Enterprise Update decks, the Academic Programs training videos, and the site/node inventories — available on request.