requirements & challenges
SoCalGas, the nation’s largest natural gas distribution utility, serves more than 21 million people across Southern and Central California. The company supports homes, businesses, and communities through energy delivery, efficiency programs, and sustainability initiatives aimed at reducing emissions and advancing a cleaner energy future.
Their website required a major CMS rebuild to better support evolving content needs, improve performance, and create a more sustainable publishing workflow for both technical and non-technical teams. When I joined the project, the site was built on Drupal 8 and relied on a mix of custom and legacy components that had not kept pace with modern Drupal standards.
Many components were rigid and locked into specific templates, so even minor layout changes required unnecessary effort. The absence of Layout Builder restricted editorial control and created a reliance on developers for routine updates. This highlighted the need for a more flexible, scalable CMS solution.
Challenges and solutions we identified:
- Rebuilding a complex, high-traffic site on Drupal without disrupting ongoing operations
- Aligning development decisions with long-term content governance and marketing needs
- Creating scalable content structures that could support future growth
- Enabling non-technical staff to confidently manage and publish content
Strategy and Deployment
As part of the team behind the complete redesign of the SoCalGas corporate website, I helped transform the digital experience through a modern Drupal CMS rebuild. I emphasized modular design and editorial independence, building and testing content models, Views, and workflows in development and staging before seamlessly delivering to production.
Key contributions included:
- Participating in market research with Blink UX to inform content structure, navigation, and SEO strategy
- Collaborating with developers on CMS architecture decisions to balance flexibility with governance
- Training the development team on building efficient, reusable Drupal Views to power dynamic content across the site
- Defining content models that aligned with both technical constraints and marketing needs
- Training marketing and content teams on how to add, manage, and update content independently
- Supporting SEO implementation and validation during and after the rebuild
- Improving site accessibility by leveraging Siteimprove to identify issues, guide remediation efforts, and validate ongoing compliance with accessibility best practices
- Collecting and analyzing analytics to provide stakeholders with insight into site performance, engagement, and content effectiveness
Our approach ensured the CMS was not only technically sound, but also practical, scalable, and easy to maintain long after launch. By aligning system architecture with real editorial workflows, governance standards, and long-term content strategy, we created a framework that reduced technical debt, streamlined publishing processes, and empowered internal teams to manage updates without heavy developer reliance.
Results
The CMS rebuild gave SoCalGas a website platform that was easier to work with, easier to scale, and built to last. Development became more efficient, content updates were faster and more dependable, and marketing teams felt confident managing pages and campaigns on their own, without needing to rely on developers.
The Digital Engagement team’s work quickly stood out across the organization, and leadership took notice of both the care put into the redesign and the real improvements it made to the customer experience. The launch was strong enough that SoCalGas publicly highlighted the effort with a dedicated press release. The announcement reinforced that this wasn’t simply a website refresh, but a step forward in how the company connects with customers and delivers essential information online.
Key outcomes included:
- Improved collaboration between development, marketing, and stakeholders
- A refreshed, modern visual design that strengthened brand credibility and improved overall user experience
- Reduced dependency on developers for routine content updates
- More consistent, SEO-friendly content structures
- Enhanced accessibility through structured content, improved color contrast, semantic markup, and ongoing monitoring with Siteimprove
- Better visibility into site performance through analytics reporting with Looker Studio reports
- A CMS foundation capable of supporting future growth and evolving business needs
By aligning content strategy, training, and analytics, I helped transition the platform from a developer-dependent system to a shared, scalable foundation that teams across the organization could use with confidence. Editors gained the ability to publish and iterate more efficiently, stakeholders had clearer visibility into content performance, and developers were able to focus on higher-value work. The result was not just a modernized website, but a sustainable digital platform that continues to shape how millions of people access information and engage with SoCalGas.