Web Development
Minnesota State College Southeast is a higher education institution focused on providing career-oriented education and hands-on learning opportunities for students across a variety of programs.
As the college prepared to modernize its digital presence, it needed a scalable, user-friendly content management system that would improve both the student experience and internal content operations.
The Challenge
Minnesota State College Southeast was ready to modernize its digital experience with a move away from a legacy CMS and outdated Bootstrap 3 framework. The college needed a scalable, future-ready platform that would improve the student experience while making day-to-day content management easier for internal teams.
One of the largest challenges was the migration of approximately 47 program pages, some of the most important pages in the student decision-making journey. These pages contained inconsistent layouts, outdated internal links, and media tied to the previous hosting environment, making manual migration both time-consuming and error-prone.
Additional challenges included:
Updating unsupported front-end components and legacy styling patterns
Correcting outdated or broken internal URLs throughout the website
Migrating images and media into a new centralized Umbraco media library
Reducing the amount of manual effort required to migrate and publish content
Creating a more efficient content management experience for internal teams
The Analysis
Before development began, Marcel Digital performed a detailed review of the existing website structure, content, and migration requirements to identify opportunities for modernization and automation.
Evaluating the Legacy Website
Marcel Digital began by auditing the existing website structure, identifying outdated Bootstrap 3 components and legacy front-end patterns that would need to be modernized for compatibility with Bootstrap 5 and Umbraco 17.
Reviewing Program Page Content
The team analyzed approximately 47 program pages to uncover inconsistencies in formatting, broken links, embedded styling, and image dependencies. This review helped establish a cleaner, more scalable structure for the new website.
Identifying Opportunities for Automation
Because of the large amount of repetitive migration work involved, Marcel Digital identified an opportunity to streamline the process through automation. The team planned a custom workflow using MCP server technology, AI-assisted tooling, and the Umbraco Management API to dramatically reduce manual effort.
The Solution
Using insights gathered during the discovery and audit process, Marcel Digital developed a scalable migration strategy focused on automation, modernization, and long-term content management efficiency.
Building an MCP-Powered Migration Workflow
To accelerate the migration process, Marcel Digital developed a custom automated workflow powered by MCP server integrations and AI-assisted automation. The workflow scraped content from the legacy website, converted outdated Bootstrap 3 structures into Bootstrap 5-compatible layouts, uploaded images into the Umbraco media library, updated internal URLs, and published pages directly into Umbraco CMS.
Migrating to Umbraco Cloud
The website was migrated to Umbraco 17 hosted on Umbraco Cloud, giving Minnesota State College Southeast a modern, scalable CMS platform designed for easier content management, improved performance, and long-term flexibility.
Refining & Optimizing the Experience
Following migration, the team conducted detailed QA reviews to identify layout inconsistencies, rendering issues, broken links, and media errors. Additional SEO and analytics enhancements helped ensure the new website was positioned for long-term performance and visibility.
The Results
By leveraging MCP server technology, AI-assisted workflows, and automation, Marcel Digital transformed what would have been a heavily manual migration process into a streamlined and highly efficient workflow.
The custom migration pipeline enabled the team to successfully migrate approximately 47 program pages into Umbraco Cloud while dramatically reducing the time required for content loading, formatting updates, media migration, and publishing.
Key outcomes included:
Migration from a legacy CMS and Bootstrap 3 framework to Umbraco 17 and Bootstrap 5
Successful migration of ~47 program pages with improved consistency and structure
Centralized media management within Umbraco Cloud
Updated internal links and improved content accuracy
Simplified content management workflows for internal teams
Enhanced responsive experience for prospective students
Most importantly, the automation-first approach reduced estimated content migration time from more than 16 hours to fewer than 8 hours, including setup and QA. Tasks that traditionally could have required weeks of repetitive manual work were completed more efficiently, with greater consistency, scalability, and accuracy through the use of MCP-powered automation.
