Maintaining Web Platforms for an Ivy League Law School's Programs

The situation

An Ivy League law school’s human rights program needed its WordPress site rebuilt as a responsive platform, and then needed someone to keep it healthy. The site carried the program’s research, publications, and events, and was maintained by academic staff rather than developers. I first joined the project in 2015 through a design agency partner, and the relationship continued directly with the school afterward.

What I did

I built and launched the program’s responsive WordPress site in 2015, then stayed on as its developer. Over the following years the work included:

• Modernizing the editorial experience, including moving the site onto the block editor so staff could control layouts without developer help.
• Upgrading the platform through PHP version transitions on WP Engine hosting, resolving compatibility and database issues on staging before each move.
• Fixing recurring functional problems as they surfaced: event listings, publication links, image handling, and form integrations with the university’s survey platform.
• Supporting a second program at the school, a negotiation and mediation clinical program, with content and platform maintenance on its own WordPress site.

The engagement

The relationship ran continuously from 2015 to 2024, more than a thousand email threads of launches, upgrades, outages resolved, and questions answered. For most of that time I was the only developer the programs called. The value was less any single project than the fact that academic staff could publish for nine years without needing to think about the platform underneath them.