fermilab web modernization

The scale of the problem

Fermilab's main site ran to 50+ pages, but the real complexity was the constellation of satellite sites — experiment teams, departments, research groups — each with their own web presence in varying states of currency and usability. The decision to standardize on WordPress was strategic: it would make content updates accessible to the people closest to the content, rather than routing everything through the web team's roadmap. But migrating to a new platform wasn't just a technical problem. Each site needed its IA and content reconsidered, not just ported.

I was one of two designers and front-end developers on the Content Management team responsible for building out those sites, working alongside backend engineers, a business analyst, and collaborating with two content writers from the Communications team — one of whom was leading the program and rebranding effort overall.

Technical Publications: the first migration

The Technical Publications site was one of the first sites I ported from Apache to WordPress, and it became a template for how to approach the content migration work. Rather than simply recreating the existing structure in a new skin, I spent time understanding the actual process of submitting a technical publication at Fermilab — the workflow scientists and researchers followed, the information they needed at each stage, and where the existing site created friction.

The redesign reorganized the homepage content into a clearer information hierarchy, grouping related tasks and resources to reflect the actual submission process rather than the internal organizational structure that had shaped the original site. The before-and-after captures both the visual modernization and the structural rethinking underneath it.

Office of Partnerships and Technology Transfer: IA from scratch

The most open-ended site I worked on was the Office of Partnerships and Technology Transfer — a department that had no web presence at all. That meant no existing structure to reference, and no obvious model for how to organize their content. I worked as part of a three-person team with a business relationship manager and another developer, spending significant time reviewing internal presentations, documentation, and doing market research on how peer national laboratories structured similar pages.

The IA process went through three wireframe iterations. The first followed the department's own internal navigation logic. The second shifted toward more user-focused actions — organizing around what external partners and technology transfer prospects actually needed to do, rather than how the department organized itself internally. The third accepted the navigation structure from that second option and refined it. We presented the options to the department directly to get their input before finalizing.

The resulting site gave the department a public-facing presence structured around external user journeys — industry partners looking to license technology, researchers exploring collaboration opportunities — rather than internal org charts.

WordPress/SharePoint search plugin

One of the more technically interesting projects was a WordPress plugin I co-developed with another developer to connect to Fermilab's SharePoint indexed search. The goal was to give every site in the ecosystem access to a unified search experience — so users on any of the 30+ satellite sites could search across Fermilab's full content without hitting the wall of a silo. I designed the admin interface within WordPress that allowed site administrators to configure the plugin for their specific site context.

Training and empowerment

One of the most tangible outcomes of the modernization program wasn't on any screen — it was in the rooms where we trained department staff on how to use their new WordPress sites. For many departments, this was the first time they could update their own content without submitting a request and waiting for the web team's roadmap. The response was consistently enthusiastic. Scientists and administrators who had been dependent on the central team for even minor content changes suddenly had direct control. That shift in ownership — from web team bottleneck to department-level autonomy — was the program's most meaningful outcome for the people who worked there every day.