The background
A leading UK charitable health organisation had been running their website on Umbraco 9 — a version approaching end of life and no longer receiving security updates. The migration to Umbraco 13 wasn’t just a technical necessity; it was also an opportunity to consolidate the organisation’s brand, tidy up years of accumulated content, and build a more maintainable structure for the editorial team going forward.
I was brought in as project lead to manage the end-to-end delivery — sitting between the client’s internal teams and the external development agency, keeping the project moving, and making sure the right decisions were made by the right people at the right time.
Discovery and workshops
The project opened with a structured discovery phase. I organised and facilitated workshops with stakeholders across the organisation — bringing together marketing, communications, and the development agency to align on goals, surface concerns early, and agree on how decisions would be made throughout the project.
These sessions covered the content audit, the new information architecture, brand consolidation priorities, and the handover process between the old and new environments. Getting everyone in the same room early — and with a clear agenda — saved significant time later on.
Stakeholder coordination
Over the course of the year, I acted as the central point of contact across four groups: the internal marketing team, the communications team, the external development agency, and senior stakeholders within the organisation. This meant organising regular meetings, writing up actions, chasing decisions, and translating between technical and non-technical conversations wherever needed.
One of the more underestimated parts of a migration like this is simply keeping momentum. Content decisions get delayed, sign-off takes longer than expected, and dev timelines shift. A consistent project management presence meant blockers were surfaced quickly and resolved before they became problems.
Content architecture and layout design
Before any content moved, the structure of the new site needed agreeing. I worked with the content and comms teams to map out the information architecture — deciding which content would be carried over, what would be retired, and how the remaining pages would be organised and presented.
A significant portion of the site — around 60% of the migrated content — was made up of blogs, videos, and editorial content pieces. These needed a consistent, scalable layout that would work both for the organisation’s brand and for the editorial team managing it day to day. I designed the content structure and proposed the layout approach, which the development agency then built to spec.
Asset creation and content migration
Alongside the structural work, I was involved in creating a number of assets needed for the new site — ensuring they were built to the consolidated brand guidelines before migration began. Once the new environment was ready, I coordinated and carried out the content migration itself: moving 50–75 pieces of content from Umbraco 9 into the new Umbraco 13 structure, checking formatting, links, and media at each step.
Content reviews
Every piece of migrated content went through a review process before sign-off. This covered accuracy, brand consistency, tone, formatting, and whether the content still served a purpose on the new site. Some pieces were updated as part of the process; others were retired. The goal was to arrive at go-live with a site where every piece of content had been deliberately chosen — not just carried over by default.
Go-live and analytics
Once the new site was built, reviewed, and signed off, I coordinated the go-live process with the development agency and internal teams — managing the cutover, confirming redirects, and making sure all parties were available and briefed for launch day.
Post-launch, I set up analytics tracking on the new site to give the team visibility of how their content was performing. The migration also delivered a cleaner, more consolidated brand presence — the primary non-technical goal of the project — which the organisation could build on with confidence going forward.