Transforming a complex website into a consistent, efficient resource with AI-powered tools and Drupal

Large government agencies often face the challenge of maintaining sprawling websites that have evolved over decades, resulting in outdated formats, fragmented content, and inconsistent experiences for the public. One agency we’ve partnered with faced this exact challenge: tens of thousands of pages, hundreds of content authors, and outdated technical architecture that made site-wide improvements slow and expensive.

Our team partnered with the agency to modernize their site by migrating it to Drupal, using AI-assisted tools and a structured, component-based approach. The result was a faster, more accurate, more intuitive experience for both the agency’s internal teams and the public.

The challenge

The agency’s website reflected years of organic growth, resulting in a digital landscape that was difficult to navigate, maintain, and improve. Some of the most pressing issues included:

• High content volume: More than 21,000 pages, 3,600 media files, and 28,000 documents, some dating back 30 years and built in outdated formats like Dreamweaver or static HTML.
• Disorganized information architecture: Navigation and page structure had become fragmented, often misaligned with how users searched for information.
• Inconsistent content governance: Nearly 300 content authors across more than 60 divisions followed different processes, leading to uneven quality and design.
• Limited accessibility and technical flexibility: The custom-built platform had poor accessibility compliance and made even minor updates costly and time-consuming.
• Editor dependency on developers: Non-technical staff struggled to update content, which limited responsiveness and added unnecessary overhead.

The agency needed more than a CMS upgrade; it needed a complete overhaul of how content was structured, published, and maintained.

The approach

To address these issues and establish consistency, we helped our customer adopt Drupal, a widely used, dynamic, open-source CMS. This platform would allow them to standardize the site’s layout and datatypes, resulting in a more efficient, stable environment for publishing information. Using a proven tool like Drupal also made it possible to accomplish a significant workload within a tight deadline.

We took this opportunity to also implement a migration methodology honed through years of experience, centered on automation, consistency, and sustainability. At the heart of the effort was our custom-built Drupal Migration Engine, an AI-powered tool designed to intelligently ingest, clean, and organize legacy content. Key capabilities of this methodology are:

• Ingesting and standardizing content across formats and styles.
• Deduplicating reusable components, like Point of Contact cards, to support a “Create once, publish everywhere” model.
• Sanitizing broken links and outdated markup.
• Structuring content into clean, reusable packages ready for import into Drupal.
• Generating navigation paths and breadcrumbs based on content relationships, not hardcoded templates.

With structured content in hand, we transitioned to a modern Drupal build that prioritized flexibility and user-friendliness. The Drupal implementation featured:

• A component-based architecture that allowed content to be dynamically assembled into engaging, brand-aligned layouts.
• Automatically generated navigation based on logical content structure, which eliminated the need to manually rebuild site maps.
• Custom dashboards and editorial workflows designed to empower content editors without relying on developers.
• Display components built to WCAG accessibility compliance standards, ensuring a more inclusive user experience.

This approach enabled the agency to streamline content management while improving the public’s ability to find and understand important information.

Outcomes

The results were transformative – not just for the website, but for the agency’s overall digital operations:

• Over 21,000 pages, 28,000 documents, and 3,600 media files were successfully migrated with improved accuracy and accessibility.
• Broken links were fixed, outdated code cleaned up, and pages reorganized into a logical user-centered structure.
• What once took developer support now takes only minutes, as non-technical staff can easily update content and manage layouts using intuitive tools.
• A confusing, outdated information architecture was replaced with dynamic navigation and search, helping users get where they need to go faster.
• Migration timelines were significantly shortened: 30 years of content processed in under nine months, thanks to automation and our structured approach.

The new site is not just more modern, but it’s now more maintainable, it complies with accessibility requirements, and can grow with the agency’s future needs.

Transforming legacy into opportunity

Website modernization efforts can be complex, particularly when dealing with decades of legacy content, fragmented architecture, and the needs of a large team. By combining a structured approach with automation and modern tools, Ad Hoc helped this agency make a successful transition to a scalable, accessible Drupal platform. The use of our AI-augmented Migration Engine was instrumental in streamlining the process, reducing manual effort, and ensuring consistency across thousands of pages. The result is a site that’s easier to maintain, more responsive to people’s needs, and built to evolve: turning a legacy system into a modern, sustainable, digital foundation.