Rebuilding a complex institutional website to reflect more than 150 years of civil rights legacy, academic history, and community.
View website ↗Tougaloo College carries over 150 years of civil rights legacy and academic history in Tougaloo, Mississippi. I led the full redesign and rebuild of their website in Drupal, a project spanning 200+ public pages and 30+ reusable components.
The existing site didn't reflect any of that legacy. It was outdated, visually inconsistent, and hard to navigate. Faculty, students, and prospective families complained about it regularly. Information was buried and pages were bare. A college with this kind of history deserved a digital presence to match it.
This needed more than a cosmetic refresh. It required rethinking how information was organized and how the site could serve prospective students, current students, faculty, staff, and the wider community all at once. That meant auditing the content architecture, rebuilding the major division hubs from scratch, developing reusable components for consistency, integrating real photography to humanize the pages, and making sure everything worked on mobile.
Make information easier to find for every audience.
Build flexible components that keep 200+ pages consistent.
Bring the campus and its people into every part of the experience.
Serve students and families wherever they access the site.
I rebuilt the core division hubs, Academics, Admissions, Student Life, Administration, and News, as clear entry points for different audiences. I redesigned the Our History page to honor the college's civil rights legacy with better structure and visual presentation, rebuilt the campus map for usability, and built dedicated microsites for the Two Rivers Gala and the Business & Community Leadership Luncheon. I also rebuilt the header and footer navigation for a site this large, and developed 30+ reusable CSS and JS components so the team could maintain consistency without redoing work from scratch every time. Real campus photography went in throughout to replace empty layouts.
The site went from an inconsistent design to a unified visual system across 200+ pages. Clear division hubs now serve distinct audiences instead of burying information. The site is fully mobile responsive, and the reusable component system means updates don't require rebuilding pages from the ground up.
Institutional websites aren't just marketing tools, they're infrastructure. For a college like Tougaloo, the website is often the first and sometimes only point of contact for a family making a real decision. The design of a space reflects what you think of the people who use it, and Tougaloo's students, faculty, and alumni deserved a site that took them seriously.
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