Case Study
CMS Replatforming for NOLS
When NOLS needed to evolve beyond their outdated web platform, Lincoln Loop delivered a faceted course search and component-based content management system that empowered both users and administrators.
Background
The National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) is a nonprofit that teaches outdoor skills, leadership, and environmental ethics through immersive wilderness expeditions. Their courses range from one week to a full academic year and serve a global audience that includes high school students, educators, military teams, and corporate groups. As NOLS expanded its course offerings and diversified its audience, their legacy web platform struggled to keep pace.
Challenge
Without a CMS in place, NOLS was maintaining their existing website through manual code edits, meaning even basic changes were tedious, error-prone, and inaccessible to non-technical staff. The site structure had become inconsistent, making the course catalog confusing to navigate and registration cumbersome. Performance was also a concern: beautiful photography is central to NOLS’s storytelling and marketing, but image-heavy pages created slow load times, frustrating mobile users who made up the bulk of site traffic. Given NOLS’s global reach and increasing reliance on digital engagement, these issues could no longer be ignored.
To support their growth and mission, NOLS needed a modern, maintainable platform that:
- Was intuitive and easy to navigate
- Reflected their evolving brand
- Offered a robust course search experience with filtering and keyword search
- Gave staff more control over content
- Improved mobile performance through responsive design and smart image handling
- Supported long-term scalability and sustainability
Client
The course catalog and homepage of the NOLS website, which was non-responsive before the redesign in 2016.
The desktop and mobile version of the course catalog after the site redesign.
Solution
We began by reorganizing the site’s information architecture into intuitive, goal-driven navigation. We worked with NOLS stakeholders to define clear content workflows, ensuring staff could manage and publish content independently. Alongside these efforts, we refreshed the visual design to reflect NOLS’s updated brand story.
On the backend, we migrated NOLS to a modern, scalable Django-based CMS that dramatically improved performance, mobile responsiveness, and long-term maintainability. We designed reusable CMS components to support editorial flexibility while maintaining visual consistency. To handle the diverse and growing catalog of courses, we built a powerful faceted search interface with multiple filters and full-text search. The system was engineered to deliver relevant results whether users searched by keyword, applied filters, or both. This search flexibility enables newcomers to explore and allows returning users to quickly find a specific course.
To support NOLS’s image-rich design direction, we implemented intelligent responsive image sizing, caching, and lazy loading. This allowed for a rich visual experience without compromising load times on mobile devices.
Throughout, we trained NOLS’s team on the CMS, supported content migration, and provided a usability testing framework. Prior to launch, we executed rigorous QA testing to ensure the platform met expectations across devices and user types.
The Right Fit for the Job
NOLS needed a strategic partner who could modernize their digital experience and bring their brand to life. Lincoln Loop offered the right mix of technical depth, strategic thinking, and collaboration to meet NOLS’s complex needs. Our history of working with purpose-driven organizations made us uniquely positioned to understand both the complexity of NOLS’s offerings and the importance of their educational mission. With a team of senior Django specialists and deep expertise in performance optimization, we were able to provide end-to-end support — from content strategy and UX, to CMS replatforming, deployment, and performance optimization.
With Lincoln Loop we are getting the benefit of both a bespoke solution and design and technical best practice recommendations to ensure we are getting the best possible product and not just what we asked for.
Erin Freed Director of Information Technology, NOLS
Results
The redesigned NOLS website delivered significant improvements, driving both user engagement and operational efficiency:
- Better user experience: Powerful filters and restructured content help users navigate the site, reducing frustration and drop-offs
- Improved performance: Modern architecture and optimized images reduce page load times, especially on mobile.
- Empowered staff: Editors can now publish content independently, speeding up internal workflows.
- Long-term solution: Ten years later, the site remains in production, visually appealing, and continues to support NOLS’s expanding global presence. By keeping content and design separate, we avoided the typical CMS pitfalls that often lead to fragmented, siloed site structures over time.
In all, the project successfully addressed NOLS’s challenges, delivering lasting improvements that continue to serve the organization and its users.
10 years later
Still in production &
visually appealing
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