The Challenge

A multi-campus community college district operated 45 websites across five campuses, managed by a central web team of two. Every new site request — whether for a new academic program, a campus event, or a student organization — went into a queue that averaged eight weeks from request to launch.

The bottleneck wasn’t complexity. It was process: each new site required manual WordPress installation, theme configuration, plugin setup, analytics integration, SSO configuration, and accessibility baseline checks. The two-person team was spending 60% of their time on repetitive setup tasks instead of strategic work.

The predictable result: departments stopped waiting. Eleven “shadow” sites had appeared on free hosting platforms, personal domains, and unauthorized subdomains — outside institutional branding, without SSO, and with zero accessibility compliance.

The Approach

The district deployed Accorbis’s self-service site provisioning alongside its governance layer. The web team created three pre-approved starter kits — Academic Program, Campus Event, and Student Organization — each pre-configured with institutional branding, WCAG AA accessibility baseline, SSO integration, and Google Analytics 4 with standardized event tracking.

Department coordinators could now request and launch a new site through Accorbis’s self-service portal. The system handled provisioning automatically, while the governance layer ensured every new site met institutional standards from day one.

Meanwhile, Accorbis’s discovery engine identified all 11 shadow sites. The web team contacted each site owner with a simple offer: “We can migrate you to a compliant, branded site in 24 hours.” Ten of the eleven accepted within the first month.

The Results

Within 90 days:

• Deployment time dropped from 8 weeks to same-day for standard site requests
• Shadow sites reduced from 11 to 1 (the holdout was a faculty research blog that was eventually migrated in month 4)
• Support tickets related to new site requests dropped 60%
• The web team reclaimed 60% of their time previously spent on manual provisioning
• Every new site launched at 100% brand compliance and WCAG AA baseline — automatically

“We stopped being a bottleneck and started being a platform. Departments get their sites faster, and we get our lives back. The shadow IT problem solved itself once people realized they didn’t need to go rogue to get a site launched.”

— Director of Web Services