Case Study
Simpson College
Simpson College, a private liberal arts institution in Indianola, Iowa, runs its public website on Drupal. eWay restructured the search and content modeling layers so academic programs, faculty, news, and job listings became discoverable through dynamic content types, faceted filtering, and metadata-aware search. All of it was delivered inside the existing Drupal site without rebuilding the framework or disrupting the editorial workflow.
- Industry
- Higher Education
- Platform
- Drupal
- Services
- Drupal Development + Custom Modules
- Engagement
- Project-based
Client Snapshot
About Simpson College
- Founded
- 1860
- Scale
- 1,200+ full-time undergraduates, 80+ areas of study, 85-acre residential campus plus a West Des Moines facility
- Website
- simpson.edu
Simpson College is a private liberal arts institution in Indianola, Iowa, accredited by the Higher Learning Commission. The college serves more than 1,200 full-time undergraduate students drawn from 42 states across 80+ areas of study, with a residential campus in Indianola and an additional facility in West Des Moines.
Founded in 1860, Simpson is known for its commitment to civic engagement and non-partisan education on public issues, exemplified by the John C. Culver Public Policy Center and by back-to-back Pi Kappa Delta debate national championships in 2016 and 2018. The college has been recognized as the #1 ranked college in Iowa in the U.S. News and World Report Midwest Regional Rankings.
The Simpson website is the primary recruiting and information channel for prospective students, parents, alumni, and the broader college community. Search, navigation, and content discoverability have direct enrollment and engagement consequences for an institution at this scale.
The Challenge
A Drupal site that needed search and content modeling to actually work.
Simpson College's website is the primary recruiting and information channel for prospective students, current students, faculty, and alumni. The site runs on Drupal and serves academic programs, news, success stories, faculty information, and a growing range of dynamic content.
The institution wanted to restructure several sections without compromising the existing security or framework. Visitors needed to find information faster. Search across Major and Minor courses needed to actually return useful results. News and Success Stories needed cleaner UI. The Office of Marketing wanted a blog. The Career page needed dynamic Job Listings. Form styling needed to be consistent across the site.
The constraint was working inside the existing Drupal site rather than rebuilding it. New functionality had to honor the existing taxonomy, the existing security posture, and the content team's workflow.
What was on the list
Website search enhancements for Majors and Minors with interest and department filters
News and Success Stories sections with cleaner UI and search/filter
New blog section for the Office of Marketing
Dynamic Career and Job Listings page that updates from the back end automatically
New Paragraph components and consistent form styling across the site
The Solution
Drupal enhancements without rebuilding the site.
eWay started with the user interface and templates in Drupal, building cleaner, more intuitive layouts. New functionality was layered in without compromising the existing security or framework. Content modeling and indexing got particular attention so that search and filtering experiences reflect how content actually relates rather than how it happens to be stored.
Optimized content structure by resolving issues in the existing Drupal taxonomy
Indexed metadata so the search engine crawls titles, body content, and tags, returning results based on weighted-average term-density relevance
Built filter-as-you-type search experiences across Majors, Minors, News, and Events
Created dynamic content type relationships so professor information flows from a single source into course pages, faculty pages, and search results without manual duplication
Added a dynamic Career and Job Listings page that picks up new listings from the back end automatically
Built a new blog section for the Office of Marketing with consistent layout and editorial-friendly structure
Cleaned up UI on News and Success Stories, made the header menu dynamic, and standardized form styling across the site
Architecture
A glimpse of the stack
CMS
Drupal with custom Paragraph components
Backend
PHP and MySQL
Frontend
HTML, CSS, JavaScript
Content Modeling
Dynamic content types, taxonomy refinement, metadata-aware search index
The Outcome
Search, filter, and dynamic content that visitors can actually use.
Search that returns useful results
Metadata is now indexed so the search engine crawls titles, body content, and tags. Results come back weighted by term-density relevance rather than returning everything that mentions the search term. Visitors find information faster and with less friction.
Filter as you type
Faceted filters narrow results in real time as visitors refine what they are looking for, across Majors, Minors, News, Events, and Job Listings.
Content that updates itself
Professor information flows from a single source into course pages, faculty pages, and search results. New job listings posted in the back end appear on the careers page automatically. Less manual editorial coordination, fewer stale pages.
Consistent UI across the site
News, Success Stories, the header menu, and forms all received UI cleanup for consistency and ease of use without disrupting editorial workflow or the existing security posture.
The Simpson College Drupal site now treats search, filtering, and dynamic content as first-class platform capabilities rather than features bolted on top of templates. The work was completed inside the existing Drupal site without compromising security, framework integrity, or editorial workflow continuity.
Common questions about this engagement
What buyers ask before engaging us on a project like Simpson College
Why enhance the existing Drupal site instead of rebuilding it?
Rebuilding from scratch is rarely the right answer for an institution that already has a working Drupal site with established editorial workflows, security posture, and accumulated content history. The constraint here was to add real capability without forcing a migration. Search, content modeling, and UI improvements were all layered into the existing framework. Content authors did not need to relearn their workflow, security review did not need to start over, and the search-engine ranking signals accumulated against existing URLs were preserved.
How does the dynamic professor-to-course relationship work?
Faculty information lives as a single source of truth in Drupal. Each professor's profile is linked to the courses they teach. When a course page renders, the professor's information feeds in dynamically. When a professor's profile updates, the change flows to every course page and search result automatically. The same pattern applies to other relationships: news to topic, jobs to department, programs to faculty. This eliminates a class of stale-content problems that comes from copy-pasting information across pages.
What does 'filter as you type' actually mean for visitors?
As a visitor types into a search or filter field, the result set narrows in real time without a page refresh. On the Majors and Minors page, this means typing 'bio' immediately shows Biology, Biochemistry, and related programs. On News and Events, typing a topic narrows the results as the visitor types. The interaction is responsive and reduces the number of clicks between intent and information.
Did the editorial team need to change how they publish content?
No. The editorial workflow continues to work as it did before. The dynamic content types and metadata indexing happen underneath the surface, so authors continue to create content in Drupal exactly as they always have. New capabilities like the Office of Marketing blog and the Career and Job Listings page slot into the same authoring experience.
How does this compare to other higher-education search work eWay has done?
The Simpson engagement was a Drupal-native enhancement that worked within the existing CMS to improve search and content modeling. Other higher-education engagements have involved building dedicated search appliances on AWS that span multiple websites at once, using AWS OpenSearch and an Angular interface. The right approach depends on whether the goal is improving search inside one site or unifying search across many sites. Both patterns are part of eWay's higher-education search practice.
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