Case Study: University of Richmond achieves rapid 50-site modernization and accelerated web publishing with Hannon Hill

University of Richmond - Customer Case Study

The University of Richmond, a selective private liberal arts university, faced a major web modernization challenge: dozens of departmental sites hadn’t been updated in years and were built with Dreamweaver, FrontPage, and a homemade CMS, producing inconsistent messaging, imagery, and inefficient maintenance across the institution. The Web Services Office needed a way to standardize content ownership, speed site production, and align sites with the university’s marketing goals.

Using Hannon Hill’s Cascade CMS, a small IT team led by Eric Palmer migrated 50 sites in under three months and adopted a “site factory” approach—SCRUM workflows, templates, staging servers, checklists, and “content parties.” The effort produced a unified, repeatable process and now supports ~92 sites with shared newsfeeds, centralized course catalogs, strong analytics and meta-tagging, load-balanced publishing, and dramatically faster turnaround (tasks that once took a month now take about 1.5 days; new sites 3–4 days), enabling quicker marketing rollouts and consistent brand messaging.

University of Richmond

Eric Palmer

Web Services Office