Rift valley Institute Website Migration

Time & digital infrastructure

The Rift Valley Institute's website had served the organization reliably for many years through a complex Drupal-based infrastructure. Over time, however, increasing technical debt, outdated backend dependencies and growing maintenance overhead began to affect performance, consistency and long-term sustainability.

Opportunities

Alongside the need for infrastructural modernization, the Institute also sought to improve the usability, accessibility and visual clarity of the platform through a careful redesign process.

Our Work

Through stakeholder interviews and workflow analysis, we identified opportunities to simplify the overall system architecture while preserving the functionality that users relied upon. Rather than reproducing unnecessary technical complexity, we proposed a leaner WordPress-based infrastructure built around a carefully selected set of interoperable tools and plugins.

The project became an opportunity to rethink the website's information architecture, taxonomies and content organization in order to improve navigation, maintainability and editorial workflows across the platform.

We migrated the existing content ecosystem to a modern WordPress environment, redesigning key interface components while implementing performance, accessibility and usability improvements throughout the platform.

Results

The result was a more maintainable, sustainable and user-friendly digital infrastructure designed to support both the Institute's editorial needs and the people engaging with its research and publications over the long term.

The platform is currently maintained and supported through an ongoing collaboration with Level73 focused on infrastructural stability, long-term maintainability and the continuous evolution of the system alongside the organization's operational needs.