The Final Sprint: Migrating a Regional Arts Institution to a New Website

Some projects find you at exactly the right moment. The website for a regional arts institution was in the final stages of a major digital transformation; a redesign years in the making, backed by a significant philanthropic investment, and
now racing toward a launch deadline. They had a developer team, and they needed someone to migrate the content on a tight deadline.

The Project

The institution was moving from an older website to a completely rebuilt WordPress platform. The new site was designed to put art front and center, streamline navigation, and work beautifully on any device. It was an ambitious redesign, and I came on board during the final stretch to get in the weeds of making the vision become reality, page by page. My role was to migrate 80 pages of content to the new site before launch.

A Moving Target

What made this project unlike any I had worked on before was that the new website wasn’t finished when I started working on it. The developer team was actively building and debugging while I was migrating. The CMS was a custom-built WordPress block system which I learned using my prior experience and through communication with the team.

The old and new layouts weren’t one-to-one. I couldn’t just copy and paste content. Instead, every page required judgment calls about how to reformat content to fit the new structure. I worked from wireframes, but those were general guidelines rather than precise specifications. When a module didn’t exist yet, or a layout didn’t quite work, I flagged it and kept moving. I also learned GitHub issue tracking on the fly, identifying and communicating bugs to the dev team helped them prioritize fixes alongside their own work, improving the speed of progress.

What I Was Catching

The bugs I identified ranged from minor to significant. Some were visual, such as spacing issues, images stretching awkwardly when a content module had only one post instead of several, and navigation menus pushing outside the screen after additional items were added. Others were more consequential. I flagged that there was no way to set an H1 heading on individual pages, which is a foundational accessibility issue that affects how screen readers and search engines understand page content. The dev team addressed that fix and others, and in some cases added entirely new modules based on the gaps I surfaced alongside other team members.

I also noted places where the CMS language for content editors was unclear. Since the plan was for non-technical staff to manage the site after launch, the interface needed to be intuitive for people who weren’t web specialists. That feedback shaped how the team refined the backend experience. Throughout all of this, I tracked progress in a shared Excel spreadsheet and checked in regularly with the communications director to stay aligned on priorities as the deadline approached.

Content Migration at Scale

The 80 pages I migrated weren’t all the same. The site had a genuinely complex content ecosystem featuring exhibition pages, event listings, press releases, blog posts, FAQs, downloadable resources, and pages with embedded audio transcripts. Each content type had its own formatting requirements and its own quirks in the new CMS. I also handled outdated links, copywriting fixes, and grammar edits along the way, using the opportunity to refresh content.

The site launched in April 2026.

Still Running

The sprint may be over, but the work continues. I’m now in an ongoing phase uploading hundreds of pages of archived content across multiple areas of the site. It’s a different pace, more methodical, less urgent, but it requires the same attention to detail and the same judgment about how content fits into a system built by a team of people working toward a shared vision.

This project taught me that adaptability is the key to working fast. Using the toolkit built on personal experience is invaluable and allows me to solve problems quickly when faced with new CMS structures. It takes collaboration and focus to stay organized in a fast-moving environment and deliver quality work anyway.