Drupal Website Migration Oberlin College and Conservatory
Oberlin is a top-ranking liberal arts college and world-class conservatory of music in Oberlin, Ohio. As Drupal 7 approached end of life, their web team needed a path forward for their site, an important enrollment tool for the college. We worked with Oberlin to migrate their website to modern Drupal and build some content strategy and publishing tools for their marketing team at the same time.
We helped Oberlin recreate the functionality of their decade-old website in a six-month timeframe, train their in-house developer in Drupal 10, level up their authoring experience, and build tools to test their homepage and navigation with prospective students.
Reimagined page building with Mercury Editor
As part of the migration to Drupal 10, we built out their editing experience with Mercury Editor, Aten’s drag-and-drop Drupal publishing module. We moved their site away from a complex page building infrastructure and introduced an intuitive, drag-and-drop interface.
The result? A modern, flexible editing experience that made page building faster and easier for Oberlin’s content marketing team.
Strategic content migration at scale
Migrating Oberlin’s website was an opportunity to modernize and streamline a large, content-rich ecosystem. By identifying and transferring only active and embedded media, we reduced the total number of media files by more than 50,000, resulting in a faster, more efficient, and easier-to-manage platform without sacrificing critical content.
Collaborative delivery with Oberlin’s internal development team
From the start, we partnered closely with Oberlin’s internal web team to ensure a smooth transition and long-term success. While their team brought deep experience with Drupal 7, the move to Drupal 10 introduced new tools and workflows. We worked side by side—sharing responsibility, reviewing code, and exchanging knowledge throughout the project.
A/B testing with prospective students
Once the content migration and Drupal upgrade were complete, Oberlin’s marketing team set out to validate the homepage with prospective students. Rather than relying on costly and inflexible third-party software, we used the Drupal A/B Test JS module to run the experiment. To keep the results focused, we limited testing to off-campus visitors, ensuring we reached prospective students instead of current ones. Half of those users saw the existing homepage and navigation, while the other half experienced a new homepage paired with a redesigned navigation.
After a month of testing the two variables, their team was able to make decisions about homepage content based on heatmap insights, clicks, scroll depth, and time on the page.
Everyone I've interacted with at Aten has been a pleasure to work with - they've earned my trust time and again.
Technically speaking, they get it. They understand what we are doing with our site, the direction we are going in, and have brought solutions that have made our lives significantly easier. Special call-out to their Mercury Editor layout ecosystem; it's the toolkit I wish I'd had when we'd first started moving to a component-driven architecture within Drupal.
Are you ready to leverage your Drupal website to advance your college or university enrollment goals?