The Client
Comcast Technology Solutions (CTS) is a division of Comcast Corporation that delivers technology products and services to media, entertainment, and technology companies worldwide. From content management and distribution to advertising and streaming, CTS helps its clients navigate the demands of an increasingly complex and fast-moving industry.
The Situation
Comcast Technology Solutions needed to modernize a legacy Drupal website that no longer reflected its updated brand identity or met current accessibility, performance, or content management standards. Key objectives included:
- Align with a new brand identity: Update all layouts and components to reflect CTS's refreshed visual identity, including new microsites for product suites with unique brand identities.
- Improve content management efficiency: Empower the CTS content team with an intuitive, flexible content editing experience using Drupal's Layout Builder and a structured block library.
- Improve accessibility: Ensure the redesigned site meets accessibility standards throughout design and development.
- Future-proof the technical foundation: Migrate to a new Drupal 10 theme (Kinetic by Elevated Third), incorporating best-in-class tools, including Tailwind and Vite.
The Challenge
CTS faced numerous challenges.
- Legacy Drupal architecture: CTS’s existing site had accumulated technical debt, including outdated paragraph types, custom modules, and content types that needed to be deprecated, rebuilt, or restyled during the move to Drupal 10.
- Evolving brand guidelines: Development needed to proceed in parallel with CTS's evolving brand guidelines, requiring an agile approach to design and build decisions, including staying aligned with the product suite brand identity and translating new brand guidelines into dynamic, Drupal-ready web designs.
- Accessibility gaps: The existing site had visual and semantic HTML accessibility deficiencies. Because tools like WAVE don’t surface semantic issues (e.g., keyboard navigation, ARIA attributes), CTS required a more sophisticated approach.
- Caching and performance configuration: The existing site included components that hindered optimal caching and performance, affecting overall site usability and experience.
The Solution
With Acquia partner Elevated Third spearheading the transformation, the teams executed a phased web redesign built entirely on Drupal. They hosted on Acquia Cloud Platform, following overlapping workstreams to accelerate delivery while maintaining quality.
Define phase: Elevated Third conducted competitive research and stakeholder alignment discovery workshops to benchmark the existing site's performance and align on a new brand vision, user experience goals, and accessibility requirements.
Design phase: The UX and design team developed new layouts and components within CTS's updated brand guidelines, introduced interactivity and animation, and ensured WCAG accessibility compliance was integrated at the design level. This required extrapolating design elements while remaining brand-compliant to deliver a digital experience that was more usable, performant, and accessible, including animations and modern designs that bring a dynamic look and feel to the entire site, particularly the new homepage.
The teams intentionally decided to move away from the "plume" motif previously used throughout the site. This shape was not accessible and was difficult to produce responsive images for. The modernized design protects the Comcast brand while making content more visible, accessible, and responsive, and adds efficiencies for content authors and producers. The team also created distinct microsites and menus for each product suite while remaining compliant with the CTS brand.
Development phase: Elevated Third implemented a new Drupal 10 theme called Kinetic, using Drupal's Layout Builder and an SDC-based architecture to build a structured block library – giving CTS's content editors a flexible, drag-and-drop content management experience. This approach ensures visual consistency for brand compliance and protection while enabling greater reusability, easier maintenance, and automatic propagation of design system changes.
Specific development efforts included rebuilding all paragraphs as blocks for Layout Builder, reviewing and updating all custom modules, building the Kinetic theme from scratch, reviewing and updating caching policy configuration, implementing schema markup across all content types, and implementing accessibility testing for all components and menus using Acquia Content Optimization to identify and remediate issues. The site runs on Acquia Cloud Next with Acquia Cloud Edge, ensuring fast, secure content delivery to CTS's global audience while maintaining performance gains.
QA and Launch: The team ran sprint testing throughout development, conducted design QA and manual accessibility audits, and provided dedicated launch-day support to ensure a smooth go-live.
The Results
The redesigned site launched on August 11, 2025, delivering measurable gains across performance, accessibility, and content efficiency.
Lighthouse scores improved dramatically on mobile: performance jumped from 62 to 97, best practices from 79 to 100, and SEO from 92 to 100. Desktop results were equally strong, with performance rising from 92 to 99, best practices from 78 to 100, and SEO from 92 to 100. Page build time was, on average, 33% faster for content authors, and the site achieved WCAG 2.1 conformance.