WashU Med School
An information architecture overhaul for a university department buried in its own content.
Role
Designer & developer
Client
Washington University School of Medicine — Office of Faculty Affairs
Stack
WordPress · Roots Sage · Bootstrap · Advanced Custom Fields · Custom theme
Context
In 2013 I worked with the Office of Faculty Affairs at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. They had a departmental website that had grown organically over years — pages added by different people, navigation that had become a maze, content that was hard to find even when you knew it existed.
The Problem
The site served faculty at a major research medical school — people who are busy, often not especially web-savvy, and trying to find specific policy information, forms, or contact details quickly. The existing structure made all of that harder than it needed to be.
This was an information architecture problem before it was a design problem.
Approach
I started with a content audit and a series of stakeholder conversations to understand what people actually came to the site looking for versus what the site thought it was for. From there I rebuilt the navigation taxonomy and page hierarchy from scratch, then built a 100% custom WordPress theme on Roots Sage, using Advanced Custom Fields to give the department full control over content without requiring developer involvement for routine edits.
The proposal and scope documents for this project are in my files — it was the kind of engagement that required real discovery work before touching a line of code.
Outcome
The rebuilt site let faculty find what they needed without digging. Clean navigation, clear hierarchy, and a WordPress theme simple enough that the department could maintain it themselves. That was the brief, and that’s what got delivered.