DSHS - Content Strategy & Design

Enterprise CMS migration & IA Overhaul of Texas’ Department of State Human & Health Services

Scaled a $10M CMS migration across 3,500+ pages with a new content model, IA, and governance, lifting accessibility and core UX quality.

Context

The DSHS web ecosystem had years of accreted content: redundant pages, inconsistent structure/voice, and high literacy demands. The agency initiated a major CMS modernization to improve findability, accessibility, and operational control at scale.

I played a key role in one of the agency’s largest digital transformation initiatives. This involved a $10M+ web migration project that required the audit, rewrite, and optimization of more than 3,500 medical and health related web pages.

Initial questions & thoughts

I started to create a list of a few questions and thoughts as I started auditing the whole website

  • Who’s our target audience?

  • Who are the stakeholders, SMEs, and point of contacts for each department?

  • Need to collaborate with the project manager on the team to create a sprint planning calendar between:

    • executive stakeholders

    • SMEs

    • medical content writers

    • UI/UX designers, engineers

    • Web Services team

  • Are there consistent accessibility and plain language guidelines set in place for all medical content?

  • The web content layout is inconsistent across departments

  • The reading level for each page varied drastically between grade 10th reading and post-graduate reading levels

Results

  • 3,500+ medical and health related web pages were migrated and optimized.

  • Clear structure and metadata improved search and navigation across high-traffic sections.

  • Reduced delays in stakeholder feedback by 43% by strategizing with departments and appointing department leads with authorization to review content before publishing.

  • Helped raise the overall Digital Certainty Index score of the website from 60.7% to 83.5% in 18 months.

My approach

  • Kickoff & alignment: Collaborate with Web Services team, executives, and stakeholders to align on project scope, define constraints and success metrics.

  • Inventory & audit: Ran a full content inventory and analytics review (GA + SiteImprove) to identify top tasks, duplicates, and broken/low-value pages.

  • Information architecture & modeling: Defined a content model, section IA, and taxonomy labels; mapped legacy content → new types/templates.

  • Editorial & governance: Co-authored a plain-language + accessibility playbook and page templates; set acceptance criteria for headings, summaries, link text, and metadata.

  • Migration execution: Prioritized high-impact flows first; created rewrite checklists and QA routines; established redirect and link-hygiene rules.

  • QA: Did routine editorial + accessibility checks for rewritten content using AI tools like Hemingway Editor, custom built Grammar Checker LLM with Flesch-Kincaid calculator knowledge, and hosted stakeholder reviews for approvals.

  • Validation & iteration: Tracked DCI and accessibility KPIs; spot-tested top tasks and refined templates.