Arlington Public Schools
Forty-eight school sites and 200,000 pages, brought into one accessible platform that individual schools across the district can run themselves.
- Engaged
- 2015
- Relationship
- Ongoing
- Platform
- WordPress Multisite
- Sector
- K-12 Education
The Brief
A district that had outgrown its platform.
Arlington Public Schools had outgrown its previous digital infrastructure. The district’s content lived inside Schoolwires by Blackboard, a proprietary CMS with no standard export, and every school needed an identity of its own without breaking the district’s shared voice. The webmasters and designated staff who would manage each site day to day needed a platform that was straightforward to learn and easy to maintain. Accessibility was non-negotiable.
The Solution
Built for the people who use it every day.
We built a WordPress multisite on a single platform and designed a shared, accessible design system so each school keeps its own colors, logo, and identity. Custom scripts moved every page out of their proprietary CMS. A block-based editor lets each site’s webmaster build pages without touching code, and single sign-on ties the platform into the district’s existing login. We helped the district evolve with a second redesign post-COVID. Since our first launch in 2016, we have hosted and cared for it, and we still do.
Discovery
We learned the district before we touched the platform.
Before any design, we ran stakeholder sessions and testing with the people who live in the site: webmasters, designated staff, parents, students, and district communications. The clearest signal was that each school’s editors would be webmasters and staff whose primary responsibilities extend well beyond the website. That shaped everything downstream, from the navigation to how the page editor needed to feel.
Design
Individual schools, one connected system.
Every school wanted their site to reflect their unique identity, and the district needed all sites to feel like one connected website. We designed an accessible system where each school sets its own colors, logo, and identity on top of shared templates and components. Each template was worked out as wireframes across desktop, tablet, and mobile before moving into full design, so the system held up everywhere before a line of it was built.
Architecture
A WordPress multisite that scales to the whole district.
Forty-eight school sites run on a single WordPress multisite. One platform to maintain, one place to ship an update or a fix, and every school still independent within it. Single sign-on ties the platform into the district’s existing Rapid Identity system, so staff log in with the credentials they already have.
Editing experience
A page builder anyone can use.
Each school’s webmaster and designated staff manage their own site, so the page builder had to be straightforward from the start. We built a block-based editor where updating a page means stacking ready-made pieces, with no code and no markup required. An editor can publish a new page in minutes and trust it will look right and stay accessible. Ease of use was essential here. It is what keeps a site current, accurate, and worth coming back to.
Migration
200,000+ pages, moved off a system with no exit.
The old CMS did not support standard exports, so we wrote custom scripts to migrate all 200,000-plus pages of content into the new platform. Alongside the move we built the pieces a district runs on: calendaring with district-to-school event push, staff directories, a detailed permissions structure, and an emergency alert system.
Managed infrastructure
Hosted, updated, and carefully looked after since launch.
The platform runs in a secure cloud environment we manage, with backups, monitoring, and WordPress updates handled on a regular cadence so the district can focus on the work that matters. We trained staff at launch and keep building new templates and features as the district needs them. The same team that built it still cares for it.
In their words
It’s really the personal attention and attention to detail that have made a difference. If I ask a question, they actually answer it instead of brushing it off. With other vendors, you might call tech support and find a person reading a script at you rather than paying attention to what you’re saying. That’s not the case with Materiell. You can tell that they’re really there for the customer service and are willing to work through a problem with you.
Figures
40+
Schools online
Every elementary, middle, and high school in the district runs on one platform.
200K+
Pages migrated
A full content move from a closed CMS to WordPress using custom migration scripts.
AA
WCAG compliance
The platform was audited at launch and re-audited each year of the engagement.
Services Provided
What we shipped.
Tech Stack
What it runs on.
A WordPress multisite running on Google Cloud, indexed with ElasticSearch, gated by Rapid Identity SSO, and translated by gTranslate across every school in the district.
Next Project
George Mason University
Infrastructure management and care for the WordPress ecosystems of Virginia’s largest public research university. The students, faculty, and community who rely on these sites deserve platforms that stay current, secure, and available.
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