Acquia Cloud Site Factory blueprint covering 47 college and department sites.
Twelve-week blueprint engagement: governance model, design system, and a reference build their internal team executes against. We stayed on as the technology partner running the first three site rollouts alongside them.
What we walked into.
Forty-seven college, department, and program sites across four CMSes and a long tail of one-off WordPress installs. A digital strategy team of six trying to enforce brand and accessibility on an estate of two hundred contributors.
The provost had asked for one university, one stack, one accessible front door. The internal team had picked Acquia Cloud Site Factory; what they didn't have was the operating model that would let 47 sites ship without 47 different roadmaps.
"Every vendor pitched us a CMS. Axelerant pitched us an operating model. Six months in, our 47 department sites finally look like one university - and the brand team isn't policing it manually anymore."
Experience, data, activation, optimization.
Shared design system co-owned by central marketing and the colleges. Component library with a documented contribution path for departments who wanted bespoke work.
Canonical program catalog, faculty directory, and event model. Departments stop maintaining their own copies; the catalog renders into every site that needs it.
Inquiry, application-start, and event-registration flows standardized across the federation. One reporting model the recruitment marketing team can finally read.
Quarterly governance review process baked into the blueprint. Drift surfaced as a report, not as a complaint from the brand team.
The engagement, phase by phase.
- 01Week 1–2
Read the federation
Audited 47 sites end-to-end - content model, brand, accessibility, performance. Mapped the political model, not just the technical one.
- 02Week 3–6
Co-author the blueprint
Architecture, content model, design system, governance model, integration map (SIS, CRM, LMS). Reviewed with provost, IT, marketing, and a faculty advisory in the same room.
- 03Week 7–10
Reference rollouts
Three sites built end-to-end as the canonical reference: a flagship college, a department, and a niche program. Internal team paired through every PR.
- 04Week 11–12
Hand-off + roadmap
Documented playbook handed to internal team. We stayed on as the technology partner for the first six months of broader rollout - not as the executor, as the safety net.
The stack and the pod.
- Hosting
- Acquia Cloud Site Factory
- CMS
- Drupal 10
- Design system
- Storybook + custom Twig components
- Integrations
- Banner SIS · Salesforce · Canvas
- Accessibility
- Automated WCAG 2.2 AA on every PR
- 1× Engagement Director
- 1× Acquia / Drupal architect
- 1× Senior engineer
- 1× Design system lead
- 1× Content + governance strategist
- 1× Marketing-ops engineer (CRM integration)