Across two tenures, I led three generations of the company website from vendor-managed WordPress to Webflow and an internally maintained platform. Each rebuild removed deeper content, security, architecture, and ownership risks.
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Medical Asset Management sold specialized software to hospital departments, but its corporate website often undercut the maturity of the product. Over six years, I led three successive rebuilds while my role evolved from content and visual-design lead to platform strategist, product manager, and front-end contributor.
That progression was driven by necessity: each generation exposed a deeper problem and required me to develop the next layer of capability. The first repaired content and brand fragmentation, the second recovered from a security failure and reduced vendor dependency, and the third established internal architecture supporting education and commerce. Average tracked search position improved threefold while recurring platform costs fell 35%.
Problem
The corporate website had evolved through vendors, subsidiaries, and competing priorities
The company’s public presence accumulated through changing products, subsidiary brands, vendors, and organizational initiatives.
Website work remained secondary to customer-facing application development. External vendors filled that gap, but routine content and design became separated from the people who understood the products.
The result was a web property that changed in episodes rather than through durable ownership.
[Asset: Timeline of 2017 WordPress, 2019 Webflow, and 2021 internal platform.]
The website no longer reinforced the credibility of the company behind it
Hospital buyers encountered dated visual language, fragmented navigation, redundant copy, defunct references, incomplete product information, and brittle infrastructure.
Routine updates required vendor coordination or competed with application work. A WordPress exploit eventually took the site and administration interface offline.
The website needed coherent content, secure infrastructure, reusable architecture, and an ownership model capable of supporting marketing, customer education, and commerce.
[Assets: Annotated original site; fragmented brand; redundant sitemap; dependency map.]
insight
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Why did each redesign eventually reproduce similar problems?
I maintained a Jira project covering content, interface, development, security, and maintenance issues. I reviewed analytics and search performance and interviewed executives, sales staff, product experts, and internal contributors.
[Research assets: Jira inventory; content audit; analytics; sitemap; platform dependencies ]
Content, architecture, infrastructure, and ownership had all become barriers to trust
The credibility problem was not cosmetic. The website contradicted the company’s technical maturity because its operating model appeared as neglected as its surface.
Each redesign would decay unless it retired the conditions producing the previous version. The platform needed to improve both what buyers saw and how the organization authored, governed, secured, and extended it.
Jobs to be done: Hospital decision-makers need the website to explain the products and reinforce confidence. Internal contributors need stable structures and ownership so publishing does not compete with application delivery.
[Insight asset: Visible credibility linked to four underlying systems.]
Andrew
Claudia
Dan
decision
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I retired accumulated risk through successive rebuilds instead of reskinning the same platform
I considered whether to continue making incremental visual corrections, perform another isolated redesign, or treat each rebuild as a step toward a more mature platform.
Design tension: The interface needed to become more consistent and maintainable without disrupting workflows experienced clinical users already trusted.
I chose progressive modernization:
- Repair content and brand fragmentation.
- Reduce security and vendor dependency.
- Establish reusable page and content structures.
- Move routine ownership closer to internal teams.
- Connect design artifacts to implementable architecture.
- Add education and commerce only after the foundation was stable.
This required repeated investment and stakeholder persuasion, but each generation removed a class of risk rather than painting over it.
[Decision asset: Three platform generations mapped to the risks each retired.]
Solution
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I repaired the content, architecture, and brand
The first WordPress rebuild began as a vendor-led redesign, but the existing material could not simply be moved into a new theme. Defunct subsidiaries remained in navigation, copy was duplicated as filler, important product pages were incomplete, and parent-company colors conflicted with product identities.
I consolidated and rewrote the content, restructured the information architecture, wireframed missing pages, and unified the parent company and products under a more coherent identity. The work turned a cosmetic vendor engagement into a more substantive correction of what the site said and how visitors found it.
I recovered from a security failure, removing vendor dependency
A WordPress exploit took both the site and its administration interface offline. I published a branded caretaker page by the end of the day and rebuilt a viable Webflow site within one week. Rather than reproduce the previous sitemap, I consolidated thin pages into stronger sections, simplified navigation, and created an internal style-system page for typography, color, spacing, and reusable components. The rebuild gave a nontechnical internal team safe control of routine content and reduced dependence on external maintenance for every update.
I brought platform architecture and implementation in-house
The third generation required a more durable internal architecture. I inherited design work that had not converged and an implementation direction that was heavier than the primarily content-driven site required.
I proposed category-based information architecture, reusable component logic, structured data, and annotated page templates that connected user-facing regions to implementable structures. My role expanded from product-managing the implementation to contributing front-end code through Git. Structural wireframes based on box-model and class relationships reduced ambiguity between design and development.
I extended the platform into education and commerce
COVID-era constraints exposed the cost of flying trainers to hospitals with printed material. Rather than build a bespoke learning application, I recommended integrating a purpose-built LMS that subject-matter experts could maintain.
I authored portable HTML lesson content, connected purchases to course registration, restored shopping-cart functionality, and simplified the proposed checkout flow. This extended the website from a marketing property into a platform supporting customer education and product sales without making the internal development team responsible for maintaining a custom LMS.
I also found opportunities to reduce the number of steps in the checkout flow proposed by the previous UX designer, streamlining the checkout process to reduce friction and increase conversions.
collaboration
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I delivered each generation according to the organization’s available capacity
The first generation required directing vendor work. The second required emergency response and rapid solo implementation. The third required roadmaps, sprint planning, internal-development coordination, front-end contribution, and product-delivery integration.
Jira made priorities and target dates visible despite the website’s secondary status. Reusable structures allowed incremental improvement rather than dependence on periodic rebuilds.
I adapted my role as platform ownership moved inward
Executives and sales provided buyer context; SMEs reviewed product and educational content; vendors handled early implementation; internal engineers later reviewed architecture and code.
My role evolved from content and design lead, to solo Webflow builder, to product manager and front-end contributor. I owned audits, IA, UX/UI, roadmaps, vendor coordination, platform recommendations, code contributions, and governance.
That continuity allowed lessons from each generation to inform the next instead of being lost with every redesign.
[Collaboration asset: Ownership migration and skill progression across generations.]
Validation
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I integrated website acceptance into the company’s existing Jira review process
I learned to route website work through the same Jira-driven Functional Review and Code Review processes used for product work. This placed designs and implementations in front of developers, the product manager, SMEs, and approving executives before release.
Validation also included analytics, search performance, content QA, security recovery, internal publishing, and end-to-end commerce testing. Direct buyer research remained limited, so claims about credibility were informed by sales and leadership rather than formal prospect interviews.
[Validation asset: Jira ticket moving through functional review, code review, acceptance, and release.]
IMPACT
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I improved search visibility while lowering long-term operating cost
Average position across the tracked search-term set improved threefold across comparable 90-day periods. Combined hosting, subscriptions, and routine external maintenance costs fell 35%.
Buyers encountered a clearer explanation of the company and products. Existing customers gained a more stable path to educational and support material. Internal contributors could make routine updates without waiting for application developers or returning to full vendor dependency.
The platform also gained the architectural capacity to support education and commerce rather than remaining a static corporate brochure.
Andrew
Claudia
Dan
REFLECTION
Successive rebuilds turned an inherited website into a record of expanding product capability
The project evolved alongside my responsibilities. What began as content repair and vendor direction required me to develop deeper capability in information architecture, visual systems, Webflow implementation, platform strategy, product management, front-end development, structured data, education, and commerce. Each generation solved a problem the previous one had exposed. The progression demonstrated that platform maturity depends on more than a successful redesign: content structure, technical architecture, publishing ownership, governance, and organizational process must mature with the interface. The most durable lesson was that governance cannot be postponed until after launch. A website remains credible only when the organization can maintain the systems behind what visitors see.
I would establish the platform model earlier and complete its commercial potential
- Define structured content and governance during the first rebuild. I would establish the content model, reusable components, publishing roles, approval process, and maintenance responsibilities before selecting or implementing the first replacement platform.
- Complete and launch the online store. The proposed store and checkout work could have moved an existing manual profit center into a measurable digital channel for training, certification, and related purchases. I would prioritize bringing that experience fully into production.
- Explore an internal Academy capability sooner. The paid LMS was a practical solution because subject-matter experts could maintain it without heavy development support. However, I would earlier specify and compare a lightweight internal Academy capability based on long-term cost, integration, ownership, analytics, and flexibility.
- Conduct direct buyer research. I would interview hospital decision-makers and prospective customers to identify which trust signals materially affected evaluation rather than relying primarily on sales and executive accounts.
- Define platform success measures by generation. I would establish explicit baselines for search visibility, publishing effort, operating cost, conversion, education use, and commerce before each rebuild so the progression could be assessed through one continuous measurement model.