Infrastructure · SVA
Six years, three websites
On my first day at the MFA Interaction Design program, my boss apologized and told me the website was down. Six years later I'd rescued the server, migrated it twice chasing accessibility, and helped set the direction for a full rebrand. The new site launched after I left.
The challenge
My boss met me on my first day with an apology: sorry to do this to you on your first day, but our website is down and you need to fix it. The Craft CMS had a memory leak. The previous web designer had been purging junk files by hand on a regular schedule, and he wasn't around anymore. So I got into the server, figured out the junk files were eating the hard drive, and purged enough to get the site back up. To stop it happening again, the outdated Craft CMS had to be upgraded, and to upgrade that, the whole LAMP stack had to come up with it. I managed that too.
Then the second problem: the site wasn't accessible. We fixed the leak first, then started remediation: ARIA tags on all the images. It wasn't enough. Not close.
The approach
We brought in a Craft CMS developer to make the entire site compliant. He turned out to be more designer than technical developer, so everything server-side fell to me. We couldn't even get into the Craft backend. As the sysadmin I had full access to the web server itself, so I worked through the CMS files until I restored a way in. It worked, for a while. But I spent that year as the technical middleman between a designer who couldn't touch the server and a backend that needed constant attention, and it was frustratingly tedious.
After a year, I called it: the Craft path wasn't going to get us compliant. We pivoted. We hired another developer to migrate the whole thing from Craft to WordPress, which was supposed to be easier to make compliant. That meant a new web host, a full backup of the old site, and a conversion of the CMS. The work started in 2019. The WordPress site went live in 2022 looking exactly like the old one. It was just awful to use. Adding a blog post was frustrating, and anything beyond that meant me going into the files as the sysadmin again. Different CMS, same middleman.
In 2023 the program got a new chair, an existing faculty member who'd started the same year I did. We decided as a team to rebrand the program and redesign the website from scratch, this time making it inclusive and accessible from the start instead of bolting it on after. The rebrand was theirs, not mine. Design Systems International, an international design studio founded by NYU ITP alumni, came back with amazing concepts. We set the bar as a team: fully accessible and inclusive, something that showed the world the program was about inclusive design. They built the site around exactly that: one body of content offered in multiple formats, so visitors can choose the representation that works for them. And we brought the Visual Arts Press into the design meetings. VAP ran all SVA websites and owned the ADA remediation, and their head was a working web developer, so they kept us honest.
The outcome
Day one didn't fix the leak. It bought us time: I cleared enough disk space to get the site back up, then we fixed the leak properly with the LAMP and Craft upgrades. The stack got modernized. The WordPress migration shipped and ran for a year or two. The rebrand was designed and the new site was built.
For most of those six years I was the technical middleman, the person standing between the people who needed the website to work and the systems that wouldn't cooperate. I didn't choose that road. It was my job. The record: a dead site back up on day one, a stack modernized, a failing vendor replaced, two migrations shipped, a rebrand set up to launch accessible from the start.