It was a big February for the Digital team, to round off a big few months – hence the delay since our last post.

In early February, we finally managed to centralise the editing of our public website into one University Digital Team of 20 people. And then last week we were able to reskin the existing website into a new brand. More on the latter in another post.

Anyone who works in digital services for a university will know that centralising, formalising or professionalising the editing of a website is an arduous process. For many peers I know in leadership roles, it’s basically a pipe dream.

How we removed 1,000 editors from a devolved CMS

You might be wondering how on earth we managed to remove almost 1,000 editors from a website CMS. Well, here’s the gist, plus a few caveats.

In the beginning

About eight years ago, almost 1,200 people could edit information on the Sussex website. Reducing this figure has not been a revolution; it’s been an evolution. It started with setting an annual clean-up of the system, where we removed people who hadn’t logged in for over a year. This would reduce numbers by maybe 150 people at once. We would inevitably end up adding some of them back in, but it did mean slowly reducing the total.

When we embarked on the Student Hub project (see case study heading), I knew part of that work needed to be centralising governance of website information. By the end of it, five years later, we’d removed another 200 editors from the system.

Changing the tone

After the Covid pandemic, we changed the discourse and tone, and limited permissions in order to send a different message. We limited some editors to staging-access only, so that people might start getting used to liaising more with a central team. We started limited permissions by fixing the colours of navigation elements in template items, and reducing the options for customising grid systems, which would cause havoc on different devices.

Communicating more

Since we started the New Web Estate project three years ago, for the 600-odd editors on the system, I listed them in a big spreadsheet, and made a note of their access. We sent them more regular messages, asking if they needed access. We told them that things were going to change, and this might mean less access or restrictions on what you could do.

We made it clear, repeatedly, that these changes were about improving the website and the user experience, so that we could compete better across the internet with other universities.

A fairly key communication at this stage was limiting the adding of new editors. Up until this point, anyone could request a new CMS editor for their team. We tried to train them all, but the turnover of staff made this impossible. So we stopped adding people, but tried to stress that a wider network of editors could work together to get things done. We also communicated that we were looking longer-term at how we were going to manage the website (without explicitly talking about centralisation) and that this step was an important part of that process.

Tightening things up

Restrictions in the CMS itself soon included taking away the ability to edit the HTML in the background of the site, and only using pre-defined components.

A big step was taking away the option to “add a new page” to the website. We tested this in August 2022 with the student and staff sub-domains on a limited number of about 12 editors, and stopped them:

• adding new pages
• deleting pages
• moving pages
• editing page URLs
• editing page h1 titles.

Instead, they had to come to the Digital team to do these things. It seemed to go smoothly, although I’ll never know all the frustrations it must have caused for CMS users who previously had the autonomy to do these things at will.

Based on this, in December 2024, we rolled out the same limitation to about 500 website editors. I find it hard to believe that, until this point, 500 people with varied levels of skills and knowledge had the power to do all the things listed above, with profound consequences for SEO, user experience and conversion optimisation. The fact that double this number of people, just a few years earlier, could do all the above, embed whatever they liked and customise front-end styling is frankly insane. It’s no one’s individual fault, but that’s universities for you: chaotic, beautiful, frustrating and unique.

This move saw less push-back than I was expecting and not quite the influx of “please add a page” requests that we thought we’d get.

In early February 2026, this work culminated in cutting the last 190 people from the web CMS.

But, but, but…

So, about those caveats…

Defining a “public website”

The Sussex web estate, for staff as well as students, is broadly open to the world, which is probably unusual for a big organisation. There is no official intranet. Very little of it is behind a log-in. Obviously Sussex has the usual collaboration tools, such as Box and the Microsoft suite, and there are some “internal” sections within some business areas, where a log-in might’ve been added at a local level, but no joined-up intranet solution.

In centralising what we have, we left editors of “internal” sections free to continue managing areas such as HR and Finance. These sections are purely staff-facing, and likely to be moved into an intranet at some point in the future. But not right now. Making this decision, which was a slight change of scope for the New Web Estate project, meant that about 50 devolved editors would continue accessing the web CMS.

Forms and files access

Without an official intranet, the web CMS also stores files, like PDFs and Word docs. Forms, too, where a user registers or requests something, are held in the CMS. The sensitive stuff is locked away in business collaboration systems, for obvious reasons, but the rest lives in the CMS, and we’ve left about 30 people with access to files and forms only, as this needs to be handled separately.

News and events – preserving bandwidth

With a massive website, you can’t bite off more than you can chew. So we have left access in place for existing editors of the news and events system, which is an add-on system to the website CMS. Once we have worked out how to manage news and events, in line with our colleagues in Communications, we will revisit this. This move has left about 120 people with access purely to upload news items. However, we do sometimes remove things that are not strictly news and repurpose them as necessary.

Scholarships and bursaries

Sussex invests in funding options for students, and this content is managed in a different CMS. We’ve left this out of scope for the short-term, but will bring it into the new website CMS later on. This has retained about another 15 site editors purely adding funding entries to the website.

Where we are now

In total, this means, outside of a newly-formed University Digital Team, about 220 people can currently manage information that can be viewed externally. What they each can do is limited, but it helps us manage the change in the short-term and prepare Sussex for the transition to a new intranet later on.

The fallout

I expected a strong reaction from the University community throughout this transformation, but the negativity, at least that we know of, has been remarkably limited. I’ve had a few people over the past weeks express concerns over the process. But in each case I’ve made the effort to explain the reasons and, where needed, offered to chat things through. We are only two weeks in, and rather than a revolutionary response to the change, perhaps we should anticipate an evolutionary response as resourceful people find workarounds to the latest change. But they should know that the change is being done for the right reasons.

One thing that has been clear to me throughout this is that however you try to implement such a change, you have to allow room for your stakeholders to give permission for the change to happen. It took us eight years to get to this moment, to land a change that I knew we needed to make, in a way that’s congruent with Sussex’s culture.

I would like to thank everyone who has been part of the Digital team for believing in this change. More so, though, I would like to give heartfelt thanks to those across the University who I know might have felt concerned or unsettled by the change, and for allowing us to give it a go. Time will tell if what we’ve achieved can be sustained, in the face of a tough marketplace, but we have surely given ourselves a better chance of winning together.

To be continued…