Our talk will present the most salient aspects of what we call the HMS Flagship Refresh project, born out of multiple needs: integrating the MD Program’s content into the site, before OpenScholar’s decommissioning in November 2025; enhancing the role of the site as an editorial product, after the 2023 launch of the standalone Harvard Medicine magazine; and the structural and visual modernization of the site, which in 2024 was the oldest flagship among Harvard schools.

Our main constraints were, predictably, time and budget, and the idea that finding a way to keep working on the existing site would be more economical and sustainable than embarking in a multi-year, full-on redesign-and-rebuild project. In addition to that, not fully outsourcing the project would allow us to take advantage of our small but experienced web-development team.

We’ll explore the main aspects of our approach:
1. We hired vendors for key project milestones: content strategy to integrate the new content while preserving the site’s integrity, and design and front-end development for new and refreshed components
2. We established a multi-office collaboration process with strong project management and internal communication to make the process transparent and inclusive of all stakeholders, including school leadership and site owners
3. We have been progressively rebuilding the site using modern, flexible, and sustainable techniques, from layout patterns to coding standards and Drupal-related technologies