Rebuilding Navigation for a 150-Year-Old Institution

A private university with over 150 years of institutional history had a website that no longer reflected its academic standing. The existing site held over 150 pages, with the vast majority sitting a single level deep, effectively a flat list with no real hierarchy underneath it.

Most visitors arrived through search rather than site navigation, meaning people were bypassing the site's structure entirely. A "Page not found" error page ranked among the site's most-visited pages, a clear signal of broken links and structural decay.

I led a competitive benchmarking review, positioning the university against several peer institutions across a dozen dimensions, including location advantage, affordability, research standing, and career preparation. That analysis surfaced a specific, defensible opportunity tied to the university's home city, one none of its peers were meaningfully using in their own digital presence.

I led the resulting information architecture, restructuring the site into a clear set of top-level navigation areas. Undergraduate and graduate admissions were split into distinct pathways, since the two audiences have different needs and entry points. A research and innovation section was elevated to stand on its own, making the university's research designation visible rather than buried. Dedicated landing pages were built for current students, faculty, and alumni, a direct response to the finding that these audiences were navigating almost entirely by bookmarks and search.

Rather than letting the structure move straight into visual design, I built a tree-testing methodology to validate it first, eleven tasks, each paired with a specific research question, worded carefully to avoid telegraphing the "correct" answer.

A full research-to-structure pipeline, not isolated deliverables. Every structural decision traces back to a specific finding, and the structure was built to be tested and validated before visual design locked anything in.