The college website has been the focal point of admissions for more than 20 years. In that time, sites have grown, user habits have shifted, and the way colleges market themselves online has changed completely. As page numbers increase, there are whole sections that don’t get touched to make sure they still fit the vision.
That gap has a name: content debt. Information is constantly added and updated, and without a process to compare what’s new with what’s old, content slips through the cracks. Forgotten sections, outdated instructions, and pages no one knew still existed influence search results, get scraped by AI crawlers, and erode your team’s ability to maintain everything else.
A content governance plan is the answer, but it’s not a document you file in a drawer (or, more likely, a Drive). It’s a living framework for how an institution makes decisions about its content. And it’s not set-and-forget: content needs change, user patterns evolve, and technology shifts. Your governance plan has to evolve with them.
Realizing the Content Problem
Randolph-Macon College (RMC) in Ashland, Va., knows this firsthand. With more than 100 content managers and somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 content items on its pre-2014 site, the college couldn’t maintain quality across its digital presence. Governance was reactive — surfacing only when something broke — and dependent on busy content owners who had classes to teach.
Brent Hoard, Senior Director of Digital Strategy at RMC, recognized the problem and set out to make the website serve its primary purpose: recruiting students. Hoard has guided the college through multiple redesigns and platform evolutions, from Dreamweaver templates to today’s WordPress CMS.
The turning point came when Digital Wave partnered with RMC to design a new information architecture and sitemap. That framework became the structural backbone the college used to attack its content debt, shrinking the site to roughly 1,500 items at the 2014 relaunch. But the work didn’t end there — content debt has a way of creeping back, and keeping it in check has required years of disciplined, proactive governance.
Growing Content Debt
RMC brought Digital Wave in to redesign and build a new Sitefinity website. Their earlier web projects handled content by bringing it all over with a scripted port. By the 2013 kickoff, the site held more than 20,000 content items, including pages and news articles. As Hoard monitored the analytics, he began to find factual inaccuracies and outdated images that portrayed the college negatively.
“We had discovered that there was a manual for our pre-med program that was attracting a lot of attention and traffic… and there were factual inaccuracies in that pre-med handbook,” Hoard said. Another story involved old images of a dorm prominently displayed in search results, despite renovations that transformed the space into one of the nicest living accommodations. Hoard used these stories and others to get buy-in from content owners to start addressing their bloated sections.
At the time, individual departments managed their content, leaving the college to request any important updates. More than 100 people had access to the CMS to update their content, many of whom were also professors and held full-time jobs on top of managing the site. Hoard’s team would work with those people to make changes, but it was hard to ensure the entire site fulfilled its mission as a recruitment tool.
“The website is intended to recruit students first. It has multiple goals. We all have websites that serve multiple audiences, but the first among them has always been recruitment,” said Hoard.
Introducing Content Governance
Digital Wave recognized the growing content problem and worked closely with RMC to address the issue during the redesign. We designed a new information architecture (IA) that prioritized prospective students and gave the college a framework for what content it did and did not need anymore.
“Digital Wave refined the IA into which content would eventually be poured. That was a thorough process that involved focus groups, working with the community, and different revisions of wireframes to come up with what that plan would ultimately be,” said Hoard.
To implement the new structure, content was audited and reworked to fit the new pathways and better serve prospective students. The initial content audit, led by Hoard, involved going to each content owner and handing them a printed binder of their content. Each content manager was asked to mark up the content as though it were a paper being graded. They even had a rubber stamp for people to mark pages for deletion. Hoard found it an effective way to meet with each content manager, discuss what was on the site, and reframe their goals.
“I remember one department was a six-inch binder. It was a bit shocking to some of those faculty when I handed them a six-inch binder, and they were like, ‘Oh my gosh, really?’ I said, ‘Yeah,'” Hoard said.
Using the new site and architecture as a guide, RMC reduced the site from more than 20,000 to 1,500 content items. The guidance from Digital Wave introduced a path towards keeping content in check by focusing on their goals. But the process was only getting started.
Proactive Content Governance
The new structure gave RMC focus and clarity in content, but soon the number of content items crept up to around 2,500. Following the launch of their site in 2014, they still had over 100 content authors. The redevelopment process had provided a catalyst for shifting people’s thinking about content, but maintaining the content strategy required governance to ensure it remained on strategy and aligned with the college’s overarching goal of attracting prospective students.
Before the problem spiraled into a larger issue that would require another expensive redesign or outside vendor, RMC decided to bring the content management responsibilities into the marketing department, rather than to their fleet of content authors.
“We’re a centralized model now. We don’t have content editors outside the marketing office, and departments and offices can send us requests today. We’re generally much more proactive,” said Hoard.
While each group used to control its content, shrinking the site and focusing more has allowed the marketing team to take over. While the strategy is working, Hoard admitted he worried the team would be drowning in website updates. What they found, however, was that the smaller site, centralized control, and proactive planning took much of the stress out of the system and made the entire process more manageable.
“Taking the leap of faith was probably the most substantial hurdle for a lot of folks, myself included. But… the smaller, more refined content stack proved that the workload was sustainable,” Hoard said.
Through careful planning and a tasking system, the content team is proactive about updates rather than reactive. The marketing team is familiar with the cadence of updates and, rather than wait for content specialists to come to them, they will reach out when key deadlines approach. It’s been a win-win for the college professors who used to squeeze in website updates around teaching and the college marketing team.
“That approach is much more manageable when you have a smaller tech stack or a content stack,” Hoard said.
Start Your Content Governance Journey
Hoard’s team turned its content debt problem into a college-wide governance program that has held up for more than a decade.
“We’ve moved from static Dreamweaver templates to dynamic content to a content model that’s more proactive. We are much more intentional with our messaging and recruitment strategy. We are standing on the precipice of moving into web personalization… Our sophistication is rising,” Hoard said.
While Hoard acknowledges that every institution’s ground game is different, he maintains that the benefits of a lean site are universal. Even when the specific path differs, the lessons translate: a more focused website opens real opportunities.
The first step towards tackling content debt is to assess the problem. Digital Wave assessed the state of RMC’s website and developed a path forward that RMC continues to reference over 10 years later.
Reach out and start tackling your own content debt today.
Posted on June 15, 2026 by TJ Gunther in Commentary
The college website has been the focal point of admissions for more than 20 years. In that time, sites have grown, user habits have shifted, and the way colleges market themselves online has changed completely. As page numbers increase, there are whole sections that don’t get touched to make sure they still fit the vision.
That gap has a name: content debt. Information is constantly added and updated, and without a process to compare what’s new with what’s old, content slips through the cracks. Forgotten sections, outdated instructions, and pages no one knew still existed influence search results, get scraped by AI crawlers, and erode your team’s ability to maintain everything else.
A content governance plan is the answer, but it’s not a document you file in a drawer (or, more likely, a Drive). It’s a living framework for how an institution makes decisions about its content. And it’s not set-and-forget: content needs change, user patterns evolve, and technology shifts. Your governance plan has to evolve with them.
Realizing the Content Problem
Randolph-Macon College (RMC) in Ashland, Va., knows this firsthand. With more than 100 content managers and somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 content items on its pre-2014 site, the college couldn’t maintain quality across its digital presence. Governance was reactive — surfacing only when something broke — and dependent on busy content owners who had classes to teach.
Brent Hoard, Senior Director of Digital Strategy at RMC, recognized the problem and set out to make the website serve its primary purpose: recruiting students. Hoard has guided the college through multiple redesigns and platform evolutions, from Dreamweaver templates to today’s WordPress CMS.
The turning point came when Digital Wave partnered with RMC to design a new information architecture and sitemap. That framework became the structural backbone the college used to attack its content debt, shrinking the site to roughly 1,500 items at the 2014 relaunch. But the work didn’t end there — content debt has a way of creeping back, and keeping it in check has required years of disciplined, proactive governance.
Growing Content Debt
RMC brought Digital Wave in to redesign and build a new Sitefinity website. Their earlier web projects handled content by bringing it all over with a scripted port. By the 2013 kickoff, the site held more than 20,000 content items, including pages and news articles. As Hoard monitored the analytics, he began to find factual inaccuracies and outdated images that portrayed the college negatively.
“We had discovered that there was a manual for our pre-med program that was attracting a lot of attention and traffic… and there were factual inaccuracies in that pre-med handbook,” Hoard said. Another story involved old images of a dorm prominently displayed in search results, despite renovations that transformed the space into one of the nicest living accommodations. Hoard used these stories and others to get buy-in from content owners to start addressing their bloated sections.
At the time, individual departments managed their content, leaving the college to request any important updates. More than 100 people had access to the CMS to update their content, many of whom were also professors and held full-time jobs on top of managing the site. Hoard’s team would work with those people to make changes, but it was hard to ensure the entire site fulfilled its mission as a recruitment tool.
“The website is intended to recruit students first. It has multiple goals. We all have websites that serve multiple audiences, but the first among them has always been recruitment,” said Hoard.
Introducing Content Governance
Digital Wave recognized the growing content problem and worked closely with RMC to address the issue during the redesign. We designed a new information architecture (IA) that prioritized prospective students and gave the college a framework for what content it did and did not need anymore.
“Digital Wave refined the IA into which content would eventually be poured. That was a thorough process that involved focus groups, working with the community, and different revisions of wireframes to come up with what that plan would ultimately be,” said Hoard.
To implement the new structure, content was audited and reworked to fit the new pathways and better serve prospective students. The initial content audit, led by Hoard, involved going to each content owner and handing them a printed binder of their content. Each content manager was asked to mark up the content as though it were a paper being graded. They even had a rubber stamp for people to mark pages for deletion. Hoard found it an effective way to meet with each content manager, discuss what was on the site, and reframe their goals.
“I remember one department was a six-inch binder. It was a bit shocking to some of those faculty when I handed them a six-inch binder, and they were like, ‘Oh my gosh, really?’ I said, ‘Yeah,'” Hoard said.
Using the new site and architecture as a guide, RMC reduced the site from more than 20,000 to 1,500 content items. The guidance from Digital Wave introduced a path towards keeping content in check by focusing on their goals. But the process was only getting started.
Proactive Content Governance
The new structure gave RMC focus and clarity in content, but soon the number of content items crept up to around 2,500. Following the launch of their site in 2014, they still had over 100 content authors. The redevelopment process had provided a catalyst for shifting people’s thinking about content, but maintaining the content strategy required governance to ensure it remained on strategy and aligned with the college’s overarching goal of attracting prospective students.
Before the problem spiraled into a larger issue that would require another expensive redesign or outside vendor, RMC decided to bring the content management responsibilities into the marketing department, rather than to their fleet of content authors.
“We’re a centralized model now. We don’t have content editors outside the marketing office, and departments and offices can send us requests today. We’re generally much more proactive,” said Hoard.
While each group used to control its content, shrinking the site and focusing more has allowed the marketing team to take over. While the strategy is working, Hoard admitted he worried the team would be drowning in website updates. What they found, however, was that the smaller site, centralized control, and proactive planning took much of the stress out of the system and made the entire process more manageable.
“Taking the leap of faith was probably the most substantial hurdle for a lot of folks, myself included. But… the smaller, more refined content stack proved that the workload was sustainable,” Hoard said.
Through careful planning and a tasking system, the content team is proactive about updates rather than reactive. The marketing team is familiar with the cadence of updates and, rather than wait for content specialists to come to them, they will reach out when key deadlines approach. It’s been a win-win for the college professors who used to squeeze in website updates around teaching and the college marketing team.
“That approach is much more manageable when you have a smaller tech stack or a content stack,” Hoard said.
Start Your Content Governance Journey
Hoard’s team turned its content debt problem into a college-wide governance program that has held up for more than a decade.
“We’ve moved from static Dreamweaver templates to dynamic content to a content model that’s more proactive. We are much more intentional with our messaging and recruitment strategy. We are standing on the precipice of moving into web personalization… Our sophistication is rising,” Hoard said.
While Hoard acknowledges that every institution’s ground game is different, he maintains that the benefits of a lean site are universal. Even when the specific path differs, the lessons translate: a more focused website opens real opportunities.
The first step towards tackling content debt is to assess the problem. Digital Wave assessed the state of RMC’s website and developed a path forward that RMC continues to reference over 10 years later.
Reach out and start tackling your own content debt today.
Tagged With These Topics
About TJ Gunther
TJ is a content strategist who has been at Digital Wave since 2012. He specializes in content process and provides Google Analytics consultation.
Related Posts
Tackling Content Hoarding: How to Get Buy-In to Clean Up Your Digital Foundation
Post by Sarah Ailes
Graham Lewis of Hannon Hill recently highlighted a critical truth about higher education websites: “A full redesign every 3–5 years won’t...
Higher Ed Mergers Might Be Our Future
Post by Sarah Ailes
Higher education is under unprecedented pressure. With the enrollment cliff here, institutions are forced to adapt to reduce costs while maintaining...