Engineering at Scale on Stanford's Multi-Site Research Platform
A range of research groups at Stanford each needed a web presence, but building and maintaining every site independently was slow, costly, and hard to keep consistent.
Working as a development partner alongside design agency Written, we built on the platform's shared foundation: extending it with reusable components and patterns, hardening existing sites, and supporting new rollouts.
Multiple sites launched and stabilized on a consistent, maintainable base, with content migrated onto the platform and enterprise systems integrated along the way.
One platform, many research groups
Stanford is home to a wide range of research groups, labs, and programs, each with its own audience, content, and need for a web presence. Building and maintaining every one of those sites independently is slow, costly, and hard to keep consistent. The answer was a shared multi-site Drupal platform with many stakeholders behind it.
Savas joined as a development partner, working alongside design agency Written, to help that platform deliver.
A shared foundation, made stronger
Rather than one-off builds, the work centered on the platform’s shared foundation. We extended it with reusable components and content patterns, from page-building blocks to shared navigation, so an improvement made once carried across every site built on the platform.
Stabilize, migrate, integrate
Across multiple engagements we hardened existing sites, supported new rollouts, and moved real content: including a full content migration for one of Stanford’s largest research facilities, with custom migration tooling built to preserve structure along the way. We also connected sites to the enterprise systems these teams run on: data dashboards, service management, and single sign-on.
Working at organizational scale
This was systems-level work: many sites, many stakeholders, one foundation. Every fix and every component compounded across the platform instead of stopping at a single site.
Infrastructure that compounds
The most valuable work here wasn’t any single website: it was strengthening the platform underneath, so each group that followed launched faster on a more reliable base.
.jpg)
