Duke Today Redesign
After multiple organizational transitions left Duke’s flagship news outlet’s redesign incomplete and in need of a new development team nearly two years into the project, design and user experience agency Cuberis entrusted Savas Labs to audit the work, implement new functionality, and execute a complex content migration within a four-month turnaround.
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Duke Today is a hub for news produced around Duke University. Articles are produced by staff and faculty across the university and health system to comprise a one-stop-shop for news from around Duke.
Project highlights
Content migration
Custom module development
User experience enhancement
Dockerized deployment
The Objective
Given the prolonged project history that had gone through two development agencies, when design agency and fellow Durham natives Cuberis asked Savas Labs to partner, our edict was to determine what was complete and what remained so we could deliver the finished product to an eager client as soon as possible.
Our Approach
We began the engagement with a standard audit assessing system quality and functional completion. Once we were better oriented with organizational goals and remaining work, we used an automated testing framework to ensure protection of crucial business goals during the fast-paced development that was required. We collaborated daily with the Cuberis team to tie the established user experience with our functional improvements. We implemented system monitoring and staged work on Duke’s cutting-edge custom hosting infrastructure using Docker containerization to enlist consistent feedback from all stakeholders throughout.

The Results
With a focus on swift execution, we delivered the quality the Duke brand demands efficiently while surfacing valuable investments in best practices for security, monitoring and performance. The results were celebrated across the University. In four months, we took sixteen years and 120,000 articles worth of rich inter-departmental content and, through Cuberis’s thoughtful design, made it more engaging and accessible for the broad and distributed Duke community.
The Details
Client since | 2016 - present |
Services provided | |
Technologies used |

Blyth Morrell
Director of Strategic and Digital Communications at Duke University
We've gotten nothing but rave reviews about the new site.
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