Case Study
Franciscan University of Steubenville
Franciscan University of Steubenville operates 26 marketing websites across academic programs, schools, news, events, and student services. Each site had its own siloed search and none returned results from the others. eWay built a unified search appliance on AWS using Elasticsearch, Angular, Node.js, and Lambda. Visitors now search every site from a single interface with category filters and near-real-time indexing.
- Industry
- Higher Education
- Platform
- Custom Application on AWS
- Services
- Custom Application Development + Managed Hosting
- Engagement
- Ongoing since 2021
Client Snapshot
About Franciscan University of Steubenville
- Founded
- 1946
- Scale
- 3,500+ students, 75 programs of study, 15:1 student-faculty ratio
- Website
- www.franciscan.edu
Franciscan University of Steubenville is a private Franciscan Catholic university in Steubenville, Ohio. The institution serves more than 3,500 students across 75 programs of study, and claims the largest number of students majoring in theology, catechetics, and philosophy of any Catholic university in the United States.
Founded in 1946 as the College of Steubenville at the request of Bishop Mussio, the institution achieved university status in 1980 and adopted its current name in 1986 under the leadership of Fr. Michael Scanlan, T.O.R., who led the major reforms that restored the school's Catholic heritage.
The university's web presence spans 26 marketing websites covering academic programs, schools, departments, news, events, faculty, and student services. Together they serve prospective students, current students, parents, alumni, and the broader Catholic community drawn to Franciscan's distinctive academic and spiritual mission.
The Challenge
Twenty-six websites. Twenty-six search experiences. None of them talked to each other.
In 2021, Franciscan University awarded the contract to migrate, host, and manage their marketing websites to eWay Corp. As part of the engagement, eWay migrated 26 websites from the previous hosting provider to AWS and stood up security, monitoring, and disaster recovery for the new environment.
With the migration complete, a different problem surfaced. Each of the 26 websites had its own search function, and none of them returned results from the other sites. Visitors looking for information had to know which website to search before they could find anything. Beyond that, content categories were not distinguishable. Program information looked the same as news, events, or faculty pages in any individual site's search results.
Franciscan asked for a unified search experience: one interface that would search across all 26 websites and let visitors filter results by category. The challenge was making this work without disrupting any of the existing sites or requiring CMS-level changes that would touch each site's editorial workflow.
What was breaking the visitor experience
26 websites, each with its own siloed search function
No unified search across the public web presence
Search results not distinguishable by category (program vs news vs event vs faculty)
Visitors had to guess which website to search before they could find information
New sites added to the network had no path to a shared search experience
The Solution
An AWS-native search appliance built on Elasticsearch, Angular, and Node.js.
eWay broke the problem into three deliverables: get information and metadata out of each website, index it on a platform built for full-text search, and present it through an interface where visitors could filter results across all 26 sites. The solution combined AWS OpenSearch (Elasticsearch), an Angular single-page application, and Node.js APIs on AWS Lambda.
Identified and classified content types, fields, and metadata across all 26 websites
Indexed content into AWS OpenSearch (Elasticsearch on Apache Lucene), chosen for full-text search performance and near-real-time index latency measured in seconds
Built an Angular single-page application as the unified search interface, fully mobile-responsive across devices
Developed Node.js REST APIs published to AWS Lambda and served through AWS API Gateway, with private-network connections so only authorized services touch the index
Implemented faceted filtering for visitors to narrow results by News, Events, Student Information, Faculty Information, and other categories
Tested the appliance for functionality, usability, mobile responsiveness, and accessibility before launching at search.franciscan.edu
Architecture
A glimpse of the stack
Frontend
Angular single-page application, mobile-responsive
Search Index
AWS OpenSearch (managed Elasticsearch on Apache Lucene)
API Layer
Node.js APIs on AWS Lambda, served via API Gateway
Edge & Security
AWS WAF, CloudFront CDN, multi-AZ private subnet deployment
The Outcome
One search interface across the entire web presence.
Unified search across 26 websites
Visitors search from a single interface and see results from every Franciscan property at once. Knowing which website to search is no longer a prerequisite for finding what you came for.
Filter by what you came for
Faceted results let visitors narrow by News, Events, Student Information, Faculty Information, and other categories that match how content actually is, not just how it happens to be hosted.
Near-real-time indexing
Content updates flow into the search index within seconds, so new content shows up where visitors are actually looking. Editorial teams continue to publish from their own CMS without changing workflow.
Modular for the future
The architecture is designed so additional websites can be added to the search experience with minimal configuration. The Angular interface, API layer, and OpenSearch cluster do not need to change when the network grows.
Franciscan's web presence now functions as a single destination from a visitor's perspective, even though it is technically distributed across twenty-six sites. eWay continues to operate the AWS hosting environment, the search appliance, and the supporting Lambda and OpenSearch infrastructure under SLA, with security monitoring, performance optimization, and incident response handled by the eWay team rather than the campus IT staff.
Common questions about this engagement
What buyers ask before engaging us on a project like Franciscan University of Steubenville
Why Elasticsearch instead of querying the website databases directly?
Querying SQL databases for full-text search across many sites does not scale or perform well. Elasticsearch is built on Apache Lucene, surpasses other platforms for full-text search, and is a near-real-time search platform. The latency from when a document is indexed to when it becomes searchable is typically measured in seconds rather than minutes or hours, which matches how visitors expect search to behave on a higher-education website.
How does new content get into the search index?
Content is pulled from each website's database into the AWS OpenSearch cluster on a managed schedule. Updates propagate through to the index in near real time. The APIs that read from and write to the cluster run inside a private network, so only authorized services can touch the index. Editorial teams continue to author and publish from each site's CMS without changes to their workflow.
What happens when Franciscan adds a new website to the network?
The architecture is modular. Adding a new website to the unified search experience requires identifying its content types and metadata, then connecting the site's database to the existing indexing pipeline. The Angular interface, the API layer, and the OpenSearch cluster do not need to change. The build was deliberately designed for this kind of extension.
Is the search appliance accessible to visitors with disabilities?
The Angular interface was built and tested for accessibility alongside functionality, usability, and mobile responsiveness. The interface is fully responsive across devices and follows accessibility patterns expected of a higher-education-facing application.
What does eWay actually own day-to-day?
eWay owns the AWS hosting environment for all 26 websites, the search appliance, and the supporting Lambda, API Gateway, and OpenSearch infrastructure end to end. Security monitoring, performance optimization, and incident response are handled by the eWay team under SLA. The campus IT and marketing teams continue to publish from each website's CMS without operational maintenance burden for the search experience.
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