If you are responsible for, or the editor of, your department, school or office’s web presence on the UL website, then you will most definitely have heard from the UL Web Team over the past nine months as it undertook one of the largest migration projects seen to date on UL.ie
Thanks to this work UL.ie now occupies the top spot in the Silktide rating for accessibility in Irish Universities, and it has also improved the editor and user experience for all.
Website migration is a process whereby a website undergoes substantial URL, structure, content, design or platform changes to improve the user experience, accessibility and other important issues such as compliance with legislation.
The problem
University of Limerick has long had a web presence and before the Web Team arrived in 2018, there was no central control of web development. This meant that websites were commissioned on an individual basis with no strategy or cohesion behind them. These websites grew organically and differentially over time until they numbered well over two hundred.
The proliferation and design of websites was largely driven by internal institutional concerns rather than external user needs and objectives which resulted in a large variety of heterogenous web offerings that were disjointed in presentation and user experience and not aligned with the new central branding. In addition, most of these websites predated existing regulations on things like GDPR, ePrivacy and accessibility and so represented a risk to the university.
The solution
To solve these problems, the Web Team began a project to consolidate as much of the web offerings as possible and practical into one central system which was built to be cohesive, more user-focused and compliant with regulations and brand requirements. This was a mammoth project as individual websites can take months and years to develop, so migrating hundreds was a daunting prospect.
The project was split into two phases. The first involved designing and building the central system and an initial automated migration of around 50 key central sites. This was achieved with the help of an external agency and took nine months to complete.
During that time the migration included:
- Over 60,000 nodes (or pages)
- 70+ content types
- 95+ paragraph types
- 60+ vocabularies
- 37,000+ individual migration processes
Once this phase was completed, a second phase of manually migrating other sites into the system began.
This is a much slower and onerous prospect, but thanks to the arrival of new expertise in the Web Team in areas of content creation and UX, sites were migrated at an accelerated rate. In November 2022 there was an initial cohort of 75 sites identified for migration and as of August 2023, only 13 of those sites remain, with 9 in progress and nearing completion. So while there are still outlying sites which will be absorbed over time, the bulk of the migration is now complete.
Results
The effect of the migration has been manyfold. The central website is now entirely cohesive with all sites using the same branding and components to create pages and a consistent user experience across all pages. In addition, built-in considerations around regulations have made maintaining compliance much easier.
For example, our website, which was listed third in the Silktide rankings for accessibility in Irish Universities in April, took over the top spot in May and has maintained that position every month since. It’s also hitting a pretty impressive score of 91 on their ranking system.
Finally, it has provided a much-improved editor environment which allows our editors to quickly create rich pages and engaging content.