Content Isn't King.
It's the Entire Kingdom.
This wasn't just a website cleanup. It was a content strategy that would enable one of the world's top medical institutions to compete at a national level.
The Challenge
In the battle for authority and patient trust among elite healthcare institutions, the ultimate weapon is a world-class digital health library. Johns Hopkins knew they were in a content war with competitors like the Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic, but their own digital front was in disarray. Their immense expertise was scattered across a chaotic collection of departmental websites, each a separate digital fiefdom. This internal fragmentation was the single biggest obstacle preventing them from achieving their larger business goal.
The Mission Was Clear
Build a Competitive Advantage
Our primary objective was to create the centralized content strategy and CMS platform that would enable Johns Hopkins to build a comprehensive health library while making departmental information easier to find and compete directly with the top institutions in the country.
Put the Patient First
We had to design a unified user experience that would make it effortless for a patient to find trusted information, thereby solidifying Johns Hopkins as their primary digital resource for health answers.
Create a Single Source of Truth
To achieve the larger vision, we first had to migrate multiple, disparate medical center websites onto a single platform, eliminating the content duplication and inconsistency that was undermining their authority.
Engineer Operational Efficiency
We needed to streamline the internal content management process, freeing up brilliant medical experts from the burden of managing their own websites so they could focus on creating world-class content.
The Brutal Reality
Navigating Academic Politics
World-renowned medical departments are not easily convinced to give up autonomy. We had to persuade powerful institutional leaders to sacrifice control of their individual websites for the greater strategic good.
The Risk of Ceding Ground
A botched migration was not an option. Any drop in SEO authority during this process would be a direct gift to their national competitors, a setback they could not afford.
The Sheer Volume of Content
To build a national library, we first had to catalog, audit, and migrate thousands of pages of highly specialized and sensitive medical content, a task of enormous scale.
Defining a Shared Structure
The success of the entire health library strategy depended on our ability to get all departments to agree on a single, unified taxonomy and content structure for all medical and departmental information.
The Approach
My approach was built on a single, uncompromising principle of strategy before structure. A national health library cannot be built on a fragmented foundation. We refused to discuss page designs or CMS features until we had a rock-solid, unified content strategy that every stakeholder had agreed upon. We had to win the intellectual argument about the information architecture first, because the stakes of the larger business strategy were too high for a piecemeal approach.
Competitive Content Audit
To build the library, we first had to map the existing kingdom. We began with a massive audit, not only of their content but of their competitors', to identify gaps and opportunities.
Structured Content Modeling
We designed a system of highly structured content "blocks" (e.g., "Condition," "Treatment," "Doctor"), creating the atomic units that would allow them to build a vast, yet perfectly consistent, health library over time.
Stakeholder-Driven Taxonomy Design
We ran a series of high-level workshops with subject matter experts and department leaders, using the competitive landscape as a lever to facilitate agreement on a new, unified information architecture.
Phased Migration with SEO Oversight
e executed a carefully phased migration, department by department, with a dedicated SEO specialist monitoring redirects and search performance in real-time to ensure we didn't lose an inch of ground to competitors.
From Digital Chaos
to Competitive Edge
This project proves that the often unglamorous, painstaking work of content strategy is the true enabler of high-level digital business strategy. By getting the migration right, we delivered a win that resonated all the way to the executive suite.
From Internal Chaos to Enterprise Cohesion
We successfully unified multiple major medical centers into a single, efficient system, creating the operational efficiency and brand consistency necessary for the larger mission.
Immediate, Measurable Growth
The cleaner, more authoritative site structure paid instant dividends, driving a 10% increase in organic traffic—a significant achievement for an already high-authority domain.
A Platform Built for a Competitive Advantage
Most importantly, we delivered the scalable, centralized platform Johns Hopkins needed to stay competitive. We cleared the internal roadblocks and contributed to their national health library strategy.
Related Work
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