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 · 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 clean WordPress theme to match.
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 gave the department a navigable, maintainable web presence. Washington University is a name worth having in the portfolio — not because of prestige, but because it represents a certain kind of project: institutional, information-dense, and genuinely improved by thinking carefully about structure before aesthetics.