Arizona Admissions Site Redesign

Role

Lead Front-End Developer / Technical Lead

University of Arizona

Problem

Admissions needed a high-visibility redesign that could serve a large prospective-student audience, support frequent content changes, and still fit inside the broader Arizona site ecosystem.

Users

Prospective students, families, admissions teams, marketing stakeholders, content editors, and university audiences.

Ownership

Owned the development side of the redesign and the full experience between the shared site menu and footer.
Coordinated heavily with designers, stakeholders, and content editors so the final system worked for both visitors and the teams maintaining it.
Inherited a newer tech stack after the original tech lead left and became the person responsible for making it work in production.

Hard Parts

Delivered under a compressed deadline with intense launch pressure.
Learned and stabilized a newer Gatsby/Drupal architecture while still shipping production-ready frontend work.
Mapped Drupal paragraph content models to Gatsby/GraphQL-powered frontend components so editors could build pages without breaking layouts.

Leadership

Stepped into technical leadership after a tech-lead transition and became the implementation expert for the stack.
Translated design concepts and stakeholder needs into reusable frontend structures and editor-friendly content patterns.
Created a system that supported reusable components while still allowing custom pages and sections when the experience needed them.

Shipped

Gatsby frontend powered by Drupal JSON:API endpoints and GraphQL data pulls.
Reusable frontend components mapped to Drupal paragraph types.
Responsive admissions page experiences across desktop, tablet, and mobile.
CMS editing patterns that made page assembly easier for content editors.

Impact

The redesigned admissions experience launched successfully and received strong stakeholder feedback.
After launch, the university saw its highest student application volume to date.
The work helped establish reusable frontend/CMS patterns for future admissions updates.

Signals

Admissions ecosystem supports a prospective-student audience connected to roughly 58k students annually.Highest student application volume to date after the redesign launched.

Highlights

Built and supported public admissions experiences under real institutional deadlines.
Connected Drupal paragraph-based content structures with modern frontend component patterns.
Balanced stakeholder messaging, responsive UX, semantic markup, accessibility, SEO, and maintainable CMS editing needs.
Translated admissions goals into reusable page structures and production-ready implementation details.

Tools

DrupalReactJavaScriptTypeScriptHTML5CSS3Drupal paragraphsAccessibilitySEOCMS workflows