Montana State University Web Platform

The codebase was hard to onboard, the editing experience made accessibility errors easy to create and hard to prevent, and a fragmented navigation system left prospective students without a clear path through the university's 900+ sites.

With a June 2026 launch on the horizon, our seven-person team has set out to rebuild everything: the visual design, the content architecture, the CMS experience, and the underlying systems that hold it all together.

I've worked across the full surface of this project. Researching and analyzing hundreds of university websites, contributing to design system decisions, building the frontend component library, designing the editor experience inside Statamic, and helping shape the information architecture strategy. Our Project Manager had final creative and technical authority, but on a team this small every decision was a conversation.

The old system had real consequences. Content editors with limited web experience could unknowingly publish inaccessible content, the architecture made it easy to get things wrong. The navigation structure buried key university links after the homepage, breaking wayfinding for the people who needed it most. The faculty and staff directory excluded employees whose provisioning status didn't match system expectations (including some of our own team). And the codebase had grown so complex that onboarding new developers was a months-long investment, and even AI tools struggled to parse it.

A WAVE accessibility audit of the current homepage returned 14 contrast errors, 34 alerts, and an AIM score of 6.7 out of 10. Our new system scores a 10 out of 10.

The new website has an error on the forms, that will be remediated once it goes to production.

Three areas defined the bulk of this project. Each one is documented in detail below.

Tokens, typography, a full component library, and 20+ content sets. Each one backed by competitive research and built so that accessibility is the default, not an afterthought.

Statamic architecture designed around the 1,200+ editors who will use it. Form-based workflows, multi-campus theming, and an accessibility-first content model that makes it structurally difficult to publish broken pages.

A four-layer navigation strategy developed through research into dozens of peer institutions, designed with the prospective student as the primary audience, and built to scale across an entire university system.

This project taught me a lot, and not all of it was about design systems or CMS architecture.

Early on, I was optimizing for speed. Every job I'd had before this one came with strict deadlines and a pressure to show results fast, so that's how I worked. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to realize that this project had actual runway, and that I could slow down and ask more questions before executing. Once I figured that out, the quality of the thinking behind every decision got noticeably better. That shift shows up in the work, even if you can't always see where the line is.

The two year timeline was sometimes frustrating. I won't pretend otherwise. But looking back, I think that time is the reason this system is as considered as it is. We weren't rushing toward a launch, we were building something that had to work for a thousand editors across three campuses for years to come. The patience that felt like a liability at the time turned out to be the thing that made it good. And having the space to go that deep, it gave me something I'll carry into every project after this: a personal system for thinking. I know where to look and why. I've built a real research toolkit. I've figured out when AI is genuinely useful and when it's just noise. That's not something you get from a fast project.

Migration begins Summer 2026.