The University of Texas Alumni Association

The University of Texas Alumni Association, or the “Texas Exes,” was founded in the 80s. But don’t imagine New Wave music and Rubix Cubes: we’re talking about the 1880s. For over 100 years, the association has been a uniting force for UT graduates, and a vital resource for the university.

The Texas Exes website, texasexes.org, is the modern face of this historical association. The organization’s 100,000+ members rely on the site to read and discuss UT news, network with each other, and make donations. As such, texasexes.org is vital to the association’s continued success.

Steve Blackburn, Vice President of IT and Facilities for the Texas Exes, found it challenging to administer the site with a nonprofit’s limited resources. Their local hosting was unreliable, with outages at least twice a month. Since Blackburn lacked reporting functions, he frequently found out the site was down from his end users.

Blackburn turned to Pantheon for an elastic hosting solution that would significantly reduce downtime, free his small team from struggling with infrastructure, and provide a stable platform for future innovation.

We looked at the classic hosting solution, and we really felt Pantheon was miles above the others. It really wasn’t a hard decision. 

—Steve Blackburn, Vice President of IT and Facilities for the Exes

Before Pantheon: A Temperamental Site with Limited Capacity

In addition to Texas Exes’ members, a large number of visitors regularly hit the site when a major UT news story breaks. The previous, local hosting solution for texasexes.org suffered from performance issues under the regular daily traffic load. So when it was most crucial that the site be live, it was almost guaranteed to go offline. A patchwork of fixes and equipment added over time simply couldn’t deliver the kind of service Blackburn needed.

The deciding moment came when UT was transitioning to a new coach for the wildly popular Texas Longhorns football team. Alumni rushed to texasexes.org to read and react to the news, but instead faced error messages as the site locked up.

In addition to these performance issues, Blackburn needed a site that could integrate with Salesforce to keep in touch with members and grow the association. He knew it was time to make a change.

Choosing Pantheon for a Worry-Free Migration

Blackburn saw the opportunity to get out of the infrastructure business and focus on making texasexes.org a premiere destination for UT alumni. He reached out to his IT partner, the team at web design firm Four Kitchens, for advice.

Four Kitchens’ Designer & Front End Developer Taylor Smith knew Pantheon was a good solution for Texas Exes now and in the future. “We recommended that Texas Exes host with Pantheon because [Texas Exes’] internal hosting infrastructure was aging and probably would not have supported a successful production site. Additionally, it also wouldn't have provided development and testing instances or managed deployment via source control,” Smith says. “We knew that not only would Pantheon be an ideal platform for the production site that we intended to build, it would also be a good component of Texas Exes's larger digital strategy by hosting and guiding the migration of the other Drupal and WordPress sites that Texas Exes has built.”

After consulting with Four Kitchens and other IT professionals, Blackburn felt confident in choosing Pantheon. “I needed a web environment where I didn’t have to manage physical or virtual servers,” Blackburn says. “When I told our partners that, they knew exactly who to recommend.”

Pantheon helped Blackburn through a worry-free migration process. Blackburn built the new website on Pantheon, then migrated content from the old site. When the content was ready, Blackburn seamlessly switched to the new site. “The hardest part was moving content over to our new CMS,” Blackburn says. “But there was no downtime whatsoever. The Pantheon piece was the one thing that I did not have to worry about at all.”

With Pantheon: Stability, Support, Standardization

Since transitioning to Pantheon, Blackburn reports the site has experienced no downtime at all. Better still, he doesn’t have to take end users’ word for it: Pantheon’s uptime monitor can tell him at a glance how the site is performing.

Blackburn also was able to easily integrate Salesforce on the new site, with continued support from the Pantheon team. Even with thousands of members logging in simultaneously, the site stays live and responsive.

Before Pantheon, the workflow for updating the site was an informal process, with changes frequently made on the live server. Blackburn used Pantheon’s built-in workflow to standardize the development procedure. With Pantheon’s Multidev environment, Blackburn and Four Kitchens can continue to collaborate to add value for the Texas Exes. The two teams can work together without wasting resources on infrastructure management or risking the live site’s functionality.

The Future: A World-Class Destination for the Texas Exes

Blackburn has big plans for texasexes.org moving forward. “Now we can focus more on content, less on web administration,” he says. “We are a leader in the space. We like to show off great-looking content, graphics, and visuals. We can do that with Pantheon.” Blackburn plans to continually add content that matters to UT alumni, and continue making the site an up-to-the-minute resource.

With Pantheon, the Texas Exes have a website management platform worthy of their institution. Pantheon provides the scalability, reliability, and development tools Blackburn needs to make texasexes.org a world-class alumni website.

For more on how Pantheon works for higher education institutions, download our eBook, 4 Wonders of the Higher Education World. Or create a free EDU account to explore for yourself.