Website Transition Hub

Your Guide to the New Templates, Accessibility Requirements & Timeline

The new Stony Brook site templates are now live in Modern Campus CMS. This marks the official shift from preparation into the rebuild and migration phase. Existing sites will remain in place for now, but all departments should begin rebuilding key pages in the new template environment and planning their transition to new URLs.

The new templates are designed to meet three core goals: full ADA and WCAG 2.2 AA compliance, a faster and more consistent editing experience using modern components and snippets, and a clearer expression of Stony Brook’s current brand and voice.

Public universities must meet WCAG 2.2 AA requirements by April 24, 2026. By that date, all public-facing digital content—including webpages, documents, videos, and embedded or third-party tools—must be accessible. MARCOM will provide tools, training, and guidance, but each department is responsible for rebuilding its site and ensuring its content meets accessibility standards.

Please Note

All sites are expected to complete their migration by April 24, 2026. Teams that begin rebuilding now will have significantly fewer challenges as the deadline approaches.

What to Do Now

The templates are available and ready for web editors to use. Departments should begin rebuilding pages using the new page layouts, components, snippets, and updated global headers and footers.

This is not an automatic conversion. The new templates will not overwrite your existing site.

Think of this as moving into a new house. You bring what still serves your audience, leave behind what doesn’t, and intentionally set things up in a space built to modern standards.

In practice, this means rebuilding your homepage and top interior pages, improving navigation and structure where it adds clarity, replacing PDF-heavy content with accessible webpages when possible, ensuring images, links, headings, and tables meet accessibility best practices, and preparing redirects so visitors and search engines reach the correct new pages.

If you missed our workshop introducing what's included in the new department templates and how to get started, you can catch up here:

View the Introduction to New Web Templates Workshop Recording & Summary

Community Messages

Project Timeline

MARCOM has spent the past year designing, building, and testing the new Stony Brook web experience and Modern Campus CMS environment. With templates now live, the campus rebuild and migration phase is underway ahead of the April 24, 2026 WCAG 2.2 AA compliance deadline.

Key Milestones

Spring 2024 – Transition to managed hosting services for the website; established standardized infrastructure and ability to streamline deployments
Summer 2024 – Approval of new brand look and feel; digital exploration and usage rules defined
October 2024 – Launch of an intermediary homepage and top navigation, replacement of “rays” to “prisms”
Winter/Spring 2025 – Design and development of new digital look and feel
Summer 2025 – Integration of new homepage/secondary page template, snippets, components and assets into a fresh Modern Campus CMS environment; design of department templates and modules
Fall 2025 – User acceptance testing and refinement of new website environment; department templates and module designs finalized, development begun
December 2025 – Launch of the new main homepage and secondary pages
December 2025 through early 2026 – Final department template development, integration and testing
February 2026 – General release of new templates to all departments and units
April 24, 2026 – Digital properties must meet WCAG 2.2 AA compliance under new federal Title II regulations