Penn Vet School Website: CMS Migration and UI Design

Client School of Veterinary Medicine

Services Strategy; Project Management; UX/UI Web Design

Date April 2025

Site Design and CMS Content Migration

Project Summary

In 2023, the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine engaged with a web design and development agency to design a new website and migrate their 1,000 pages of content to a new CMS, WordPress.

My Role

I was brought in January 2024 as a UX/UI consultant to advise on the project and perform the manual migration of over 500 static pages alongside the web editor, plus review 500 dynamically migrated pages. This involved designing pages and sections in line with the new design, consolidating pages and sections, advising on taxonomy structure, recommending plugins and features, and training content editors on WordPress. Additionally, I met with stakeholders to discuss their content and implement necessary updates.

Challenges

Since many of the sections had not been updated in over 10 years, a like-for-like migration could not be performed. Many pages were removed or updated, and the remaining content was rearranged to fit the new modern design.
Pathing of the existing site was confusing and contained redundant content. This negatively impacted the site’s SEO ranking.
The timeline was tight as it was desired to launch the site as early as possible in 2025.

My Work

I put together site migration plan spreadsheets that noted every page of the original site and its status — whether migrated, consolidated, or removed. At launch, I created redirects for every page that was eliminated and verified that these redirects did not result in redirect chains.
My primary focus was the research section of the site, which consisted of five research center microsites, five research program microsites, and 26 research laboratory microsites. Each microsite had to maintain its own identity within the Penn Vet brand and consisted of one to twenty-five pages. Key microsites were first designed in Figma, then approved by the web editor and stakeholders. This saved time in building the microsite in WordPress.
I performed several content audits of the faculty, downloadable PDFs, and news articles of the site, identifying redundancies and outdated content.
I recommend several plugins to improve the user experience of the staff who would be maintaining the site. This included an event plugin that allowed for robust event features.
I also designed and migrated other key sections of the site, including Academic Departments, dual degrees, and student life.
I added SEO metadata to all key pages of the site, including every microsite home page.

Migration Plan

Below is part of the migration plan spreadsheet I put together and maintained. It served as a roadmap for the web editor and I as we built the site. Each section of the site had its own tab. Rows represented individual pages of the current site. This allowed us to make sure that all site pages were accounted for. Additionally, an audit was performed for all PDFs to determine which were to be migrated. The spreadsheet was also helpful in determining redirects.