Last night, Dr. Clay Spinuzzi, Director of UT's Computer Writing and Research Lab, entertained STC Austin with tales of the journey by which they brought CWRL's website out of the 20th century. The site, a knowledge repository holding decades worth of white papers and instructional content, was bottlenecked, unmaintainable, and inaccessible. What to do?

His solution (implemented over several years) took this form:

1. Stuff the content into a content management system. (They chose Drupal.)
2. Grow distributed authorship and expertise through bribery and self-interest: give graduate students their own Drupal sites to showcase their portfolios and to use in their classes. (Brilliant bit of psychology, that! Resulted in wide adoption plus great depth of expertise to draw on at little cost.)
3. Only then, use tools (WebXM) to crawl the whole mess for accessibility problems, and remediate them bit by bit. (They started with over 4000 errors and got down to none.)

Tips:

• Bottleneck cure: Implement a ticketing system for the CMS, so that site visitors who have problems and questions can easily submit them and admins can track and assign the issues to responsible parties.
• With open source, be wary of implementing slick plug-ins: this can cause tremendous pain when it's time to upgrade, and -- worse -- can cause rework of content that used the old plug-in.
• Plan for scalability and guard resources carefully: Other groups may ask you to host a "prototype" site for free, but their wild success could overload your system.