Redesigning for Flexibility and Migrating 20 Years of Content Redesigning for Flexibility and Migrating 20 Years of Content

Duke Today is the leading news website of Duke University. It’s home to more than one hundred thousand articles going back to the year 2000, and it serves as the archive of record for news at Duke. It’s a window into the pulse of the university, publishing stories on a wide range of topics—from research to the arts, from global issues to breaking campus news, from medicine to athletics.

When Duke Today came to us, they needed more than a refresh. Their editorial team was talented and prolific, but the tools and platform weren’t keeping pace. Search was only partially effective, leaving staff to rely on institutional memory to surface older content. The tagging system had grown unwieldy. And the homepage — still one of the most visited and symbolically important pages on the site — needed to do more than simply display the latest stories. It needed to act as a statement of Duke’s value and a reflection of the university president’s strategic priorities. They needed a platform built to match their ambitions.

A Cleaner Identity, A Stronger Homepage

As part of this project, Duke Today was separated from Working@Duke, a site that had developed its own distinct brand focused on Duke employees. Giving each site its own identity allowed Duke Today to fully establish itself as Duke University’s public-facing daily news source, without the competing editorial priorities that came with housing both audiences under one roof.

With that clarity in place, we rethought the homepage from the ground up. While homepage visits had declined over the years — a common trend across news sites — it remained a critical destination for demonstrating Duke’s commitment to research, public service, and academic excellence. Rather than treating all content equally in a simple chronological feed, the new homepage was designed to surface stories aligned with Duke’s key strategic communications pillars, giving editors the tools to be intentional about what they feature and how.

Gutenberg: A Flexible Editor Experience

The Duke Today editorial team publishes a wide range of content — from deeply researched long-form features to quick-turnaround news updates. Their legacy system didn’t give editors the flexibility to present those stories in ways that matched their creative vision. They needed a content system that could keep up.

The Gutenberg editor was our recommendation: a highly flexible, block-based content editor with a great deal of out-of-the-box functionality. But out-of-the-box wasn’t enough for Duke Today, so we went further. Working closely with their team, we designed and built a library of bespoke Gutenberg blocks tailored to their specific content needs, including a related stories block, a typographic statistics block, an editor’s note block, a research funding attribution block, and a block for denoting dialogue between multiple interviewers and a subject.

We themed each core and custom block to look polished in any configuration — whether spanning the full width of the page or sitting within a column in a more complex layout — and across all devices. The result is an editor experience that feels intuitive and gives the team the creative freedom to let the story drive the format, not the other way around.

Migration and Search

Duke Today’s Drupal 7 site housed more than 110,000 articles in a wide variety of formats and data structures, many of which had already gone through several migration processes over the years. As a site of record, preserving all of that content wasn’t optional: it was essential.

But the migration wasn’t just about preservation. The team had long struggled with a search experience that was only partially effective, leaving staff reliant on institutional memory to find and reference older content. A better data model meant better search and a more empowered editorial team.

We solved it by performing a true migration of the metadata fields used for filtering, paired with a flat archive of rendered HTML and CSS to preserve the formatting of many iterations of legacy content. This approach allowed legacy articles to retain their tagging data and continue appearing in RSS feeds, without requiring us to re-theme multiple generations of legacy templates.

The outcome: a consistent, elevated site experience across more than 110,000 articles with all the content, critical data, and historical formatting intact, and a data model built to make future migrations significantly easier.

A Site That Empowers

The team at Duke Today trusted us to reenvision their site for a second time: a testament to the partnership we’d built over years of working together. Through close collaboration, we created a sophisticated platform with a powerful storytelling experience, built to serve the editors who work in it every day and the readers who rely on it for news from one of the country’s leading universities. Duke Today’s reputation as Duke’s flagship news source is well-earned — and now their platform is built to match it.