Created, built, and maintained — with clients, not for them

A university-wide Drupal platform, grown from zero

When UCSF needed a way to serve hundreds of departments without hundreds of bespoke sites, John built the answer: a Drupal multisite platform architected to be the university's standard web service — designed, automated, and supported as a product rather than a one-off build.

The platform grew to serve the breadth of campus, moving launches and upgrades that once took weeks to minutes through automated deployment. Today the platform is run by UCSF's own staff, with Acquia handling hosting — a service built to outlast its architect.

Savings estimate from UCSF's 2013 analysis of the platform's first years, adjusted for scope; happy to walk through the math.

Complex digital operations for research universities and agencies

Eric has spent 24+ years building sites and tools for complex higher ed, academic research, and public sector environments — 19+ of them with content management systems, and over a decade leading web and digital communications operations and cross-functional teams.

His work spans information architecture, content strategy, accessibility, DevOps, and workflow design — the full connective tissue between a platform and the people who publish on it every day.

Today he is the Product Owner of UCSF's Platform for Academic Websites (PAWS) — the university's initiative to move its 30+ academic units off a "fend for yourself" landscape of aging, end-of-life sites and onto one scalable Drupal platform: centralized hosting, a shared codebase, UCSF-wide integrations, and consistent branding, with compliance built into the platform rather than audited into it after the fact. It's the platform-as-a-product playbook — the same approach John used to build UCSF's first site platform, now aimed at the academic side of the house.

Website strategy and continuous improvement, as an ongoing partner

CHCF's work depends on trust and accessibility — health policy research aimed at communities who need information to be clear, current, and easy to reach. John works with the foundation's communications team, led by Louise Chu, to develop website strategy and project-manages the ongoing program of improvements to the site.

No dramatic redesign, no big reveal — a markedly improved pace of delivered improvements at a lower cost than the previous vendor. Recent work includes migrating the site's WAF from Fastly to Cloudflare, cutting average daily unwanted bot traffic to the site by roughly 70%. It's the engagement model we offer every client: a long-term partner who knows your context, not a vendor you brief from scratch each time.

Online presence and digital fundraising in the web's first generation

John managed the Sierra Club's website and online donations in the earliest days of the web — when "digital strategy" meant explaining to people what a website was for, and online fundraising meant building trust in a channel nobody had used for giving before.

Thirty years later, the fundamentals haven't changed: meet the audience where they are, keep it accessible, and make doing good as easy as possible.