# Prompt — apply the approved Guilford copy changes to the Drupal site

Paste everything below the line into a session working against the Drupal site.
Source of truth for the approved wording is `artifacts/guilford-homepage-concepts/`
in `thellis954/ellisagency-clients` (Concept G).

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You are working on the Guilford College Drupal site at **https://guilford.ddev.site**.

Two rounds of client feedback have been approved — one from **President Jean Parvin
Bordewich**, one from **Steve Mencorini, Chief Enrollment Officer**. They have already been
applied to our design comps. Your job is to apply the same **content** changes to the real
site, **in the CMS / database** — not by editing template or theme files.

## Ground rules

1. **Content changes go in the database.** Nodes, fields, paragraphs, blocks, menu links,
   taxonomy, views text. Use Drush (`drush sqlq`, `drush php:eval`, `drush php:script`) or the
   admin UI. If a string turns out to be hard-coded in a Twig template or a config YAML, **stop
   and report it** rather than editing the template — that is a different kind of change and
   needs a different review.
2. **Take a database snapshot first** (`ddev snapshot`), and tell me the snapshot name so this
   is trivially reversible.
3. **Find before you change.** The comps are a *redesign*; the live site's wording and structure
   will not match one-to-one. For each item below, search the database for the current
   equivalent first. Report anything you cannot locate rather than creating new content to
   match the comp.
4. **Never invent a fact.** Several items below are explicitly unresolved. If a change would
   require a date, a statistic, or a policy detail you have not been given, leave it and report it.
5. **Preserve revisions.** Save changes as new revisions with a log message referencing this
   task, so Guilford can see and roll back exactly what changed.

## A · Changes from President Bordewich

1. **Hero / intro copy — avoid "build" twice.** Anywhere the site says
   *"Come build relationships, find your purpose, and build your path"*, change to
   **"Form friendships, find your purpose, and build your path."**
   Shorter variants (e.g. *"Come build relationships. Find your purpose."*) become
   **"Form friendships. Find your purpose."**

2. **President's messages → community messages.** Any link, block, menu item or heading reading
   *"President's Messages"* with the descriptor *"Letters from Jean Parvin Bordewich"* becomes
   **"Community Messages"** / **"Updates from President Jean Parvin Bordewich."**

3. **Admission intro — drop the unexplained Guilford Commitment claim.** Replace
   *"...And the Guilford Commitment, which guarantees aid for qualifying North Carolina
   families..."* with **"Financial aid to meet your needs."** so the sentence reads:
   > No application fee. Test-optional. Financial aid to meet your needs. …

4. **Remove "The Guilford Commitment" from the admission page's top-level section navigation**
   (the strip of links directly under the admission hero). Leave it in the main site navigation
   under Cost & aid, and leave the *explained* treatment on the Financial Aid page — the
   President said that one reads fine.

5. **Guilford Commitment definition** — wherever the site answers *"What is the Guilford
   Commitment?"*, the answer must open by naming who it is for:
   > **A promise to North Carolina residents that cost won't be the reason you can't attend** — a
   > package of grants and scholarships designed to keep a Guilford education within reach for
   > North Carolina families who qualify.

6. **Add the visit offer** to the Visit call-to-action on the admission page:
   > Once you visit Guilford, we know you will love it. Book an on-campus tour with our Admissions
   > Office and you will receive a **$500 grant** toward your first year's tuition once you are a
   > Guilford student.

   Note **grant**, not "rebate" — Steve corrected that wording afterwards.

7. **Photography — representation.** On the homepage, the only photograph featuring a Black
   student sat in a *"Head Start"* / high-school-programme story, directly beside an
   academics card showing an all-white seminar. Together those read as though Black students
   arrive needing academic help. Check whether the live site has the same pattern; if it does,
   change the **academics** image to one showing a genuinely mixed group in an ordinary academic
   setting. Do not solve this by adding a token image elsewhere. Report what you find either way.

## B · "Guilford Rise" is retired

The site's navigation distinguishes two programmes; body copy was using one name for both.
Split them accordingly:

| Content about… | Use |
|---|---|
| High-school / dual-enrolment (e.g. the "Head Start" story — a rising **high-school** senior earning college credit) | **High School Programs** |
| Undergraduate experiential learning — paid research, internships, fieldwork **from year one, for enrolled students** | **Hands-On Learning** |

Do not apply "High School Programs" to the undergraduate research programme — that would be
plainly wrong. If you find "Guilford Rise" in content where you cannot tell which programme is
meant, leave it and list it for me.

Also remove any navigation or chip list that shows *Hands-On Learning* and *Guilford Rise* as
two separate items — they were the same thing.

## C · Changes from Steve Mencorini

**Homepage**

8. **Reduce repetition of "189" and "349 acres".** Steve: *"we use 189 several times on it. Same
   with the 349 acres."* Count the occurrences on the homepage and cut back to **one of each**,
   keeping the instance with the most impact (in our comp, both stayed in the hero). Where you
   remove them, reword rather than leaving a gap — for example our Give paragraph became
   *"…supports student scholarships, faculty research, and the everyday work of knowing every
   student by name"* and a quick link became *"See the woods and the quad for yourself."*

9. **Retire the "189-year experiment" framing.** Steve: *"Do we want to call ourselves a 189-year
   experiment? Not sure that's the message. Maybe something about being 'rooted' — many of the
   pictures above are tree oriented."* Our comp now reads:
   > **Rooted in these woods. Still teaching a handful of students at a time.**

   ⚠️ This wording is our interpretation of a "maybe", **not yet signed off by Steve.** Apply it
   only if Tom confirms; otherwise flag the old headline for replacement and leave it.

10. **Promote the Dalai Lama photograph.** Steve: *"I'd pull the picture of the student with the
    Dalai Lama up higher. It's a GREAT pic and has several underlying messages that are good for
    us."* Find where that image/story sits on the homepage and move it into a more prominent
    slot, at a larger size if the layout supports one.

**Admission page**

11. **Make the "no AI" point explicit** in the admission intro. Steve: *"to indicate that AI isn't
    helping us read apps — not all colleges/universities can say that."* Our wording:
    > Every application is read by hand — because you're a person, not a score. **No algorithm
    > reads your file.**

12. **Headline.** Steve was not keen on *"Get known."* Approved replacement:
    > **Apply free. / Known by name.**

13. **Rotate the admission hero photography** the way the homepage hero does, if the site supports
    a multi-image hero. If it does not, report it rather than building the feature.

14. **Remove "full ride"** from the caption on the student in the admission hero — Steve says that
    is not accurate. Keep the rest of the caption.

15. **Buttons.** The gold primary button becomes **Request Information**; **Estimate Your Aid**
    moves to the secondary link position that Request Information vacated.
    ⚠️ **Hero only.** Do **not** change the "Estimate Your Aid" button in the financial-aid
    section further down the page — that one is correct and should stay. (We made exactly this
    mistake with an unbounded find-and-replace; check both before you save.)

16. **Application checklist corrections** — these are factual and confirmed by Steve:
    | Field | Change to |
    |---|---|
    | Recommendation | **Optional** (was "1 letter") |
    | Essay | **Required** (add this row) |
    | Enrollment deposit | **$250** (was $200) |
    | Decision plan — "Rolling" | **Remove the row entirely** |

17. **Sweep for consequences of #16.** Removing "rolling" and the required recommendation leaves
    contradictions elsewhere. Search the whole site for prose still claiming *rolling admission*
    or a *required letter of recommendation* and correct it — otherwise the page argues with
    itself. Ours became:
    > Guilford reviews every application holistically — a person reads your file, and we'll get
    > back to you quickly.
    and
    > A letter of recommendation, if you'd like to include one — it's optional.

18. **Remove the transfer statistic.** Steve says *"transfer information isn't accurate"* and that
    the claim *"More than a third of Guilford students start somewhere else"* is wrong. **Delete
    the statistic. Do not substitute a different number.** Keep the useful content:
    > Transferring in? Send transcripts from every college attended; we'll evaluate transfer
    > credit before you commit, so you know exactly where you stand.

## D · Do NOT change these — they are blocked on Guilford

Leave them as they are and list what you found, so we can go back with specifics.

19. **Application deadline dates.** Steve: *"we have deadlines, so we'll want to add those dates."*
    He has not supplied them. Also check any "Key dates" panel: in our comp those dates were
    placeholder content, so on the live site they may be **stale rather than merely absent**.
    Report the current dates verbatim so Guilford can confirm or replace them — do not assume
    they are correct just because they exist.

20. **The correct transfer proportion**, if Guilford wants one stated at all. Related: any claim
    like *"we accept up to 90 transfer hours"* is in the same content Steve called inaccurate.
    **Flag it, do not change it, do not delete it** — it may well be right.

21. **The financial-aid section messaging.** Steve: *"we haven't been approved for this messaging
    yet, so we need to time the website release with our financial aid strategy messaging."*
    Change nothing there. Report exactly what it currently says so we can compare it against
    whatever they approve.

## E · Verify and report

- Re-crawl each page you touched and confirm the new copy renders, with no leftover contradiction
  from #17 and no duplicated numbers from #8.
- Confirm nothing outside the intended scope changed — in particular the second "Estimate Your
  Aid" button in #15.
- Check the pages still validate and no caches are serving stale copy (`drush cr`).

Then report back with:

1. **What you changed** — page, field, before → after.
2. **What you could not find** on the live site, so we know where the comp diverges from reality.
3. **Anything hard-coded in a template** rather than editable content.
4. **The three blocked items in section D**, with the current live values quoted verbatim.
5. **The snapshot name** for rollback.

Do not push, deploy or clear anything beyond the local ddev environment.

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*Ellis Agency · Guilford College website refresh · Jul 2026*