Creating information architecture that converts

As the IB’s content lead, I restructured ibo.org to focus on awareness, engagement and conversion.

Year
2014-2015

Company
The IB

The Challenge

When I arrived at the IB, to lead an overhaul of its digital properties, the organization’s website wasn’t doing it any favors.

Visitors had trouble figuring out what the IB offered or how it could benefit schools, teachers, students, and parents. It was a missed opportunity to connect with people who were eager to learn more.

Here’s what wasn’t working:

  • The site was hard to navigate, with a messy structure

  • It didn’t clearly speak to its audience or explain the value of the IB’s programs.

  • Content was written for internal audiences.

The result? Missed opportunities to engage schools, educators, students, and parents, and a lack of meaningful calls to action.

Our goal was to overhaul the website to clearly communicate the IB’s benefits, streamline the user journey, and drive measurable engagement and conversions.

My Role

As the lead on this project, I directed and executed the content overhaul for the IB website. From rethinking the structure to writing and refining content, I ensured the new site was user-focused, impactful, and conversion-driven.

What I Did

  1. Discovery: Understanding the Gaps
    To address the website’s challenges, I:

    • Conducted a full audit of the existing site, identifying content gaps, redundancies, and navigational issues.

    • Collaborated with IB stakeholders to understand their goals, target audiences, and messaging priorities.

    • Developed a new information architecture (IA) that clearly defined audience segments and organized the IB’s offerings.

  2. Strategy: Simplifying and Streamlining
    With the IA in place, I focused on:

    • Refining messaging to strip away internal jargon and speak directly to external audiences unfamiliar with the IB.

    • Highlighting the IB’s core offerings—education programs for students and professional development for teachers—and their benefits.

    • Ensuring a consistent tone and style across all content to build trust and clarity.

    • Foregrounding information on how to become an IB school, a key conversion action for the business.

  3. Execution: Rewriting and Rebuilding
    Over six months, I:

    • Wrote or directed the rewriting of nearly 150 webpages to align with the new IA and audience focus.

    • Created clear, actionable calls to action that guided visitors toward conversions, such as requesting more information or signing up for IB programs.

    • Reviewed and edited all content to ensure accuracy, relevance, and consistency.

The Results

The redesigned IB website delivered immediate and measurable improvements

  • Clarity: Visitors now easily understand what the IB offered, along with the specific benefits of its programmes.

  • Engagement: Leads from schools interested in adopting the IB more than doubled, driven by clear messaging and a simplified user journey.

  • Scalability: The new IA and editorial approach provide a sustainable framework for future updates, ensuring the website evolves with the organization’s needs.

Why It Matters

In focusing on user needs and delivering content with clarity and purpose, we helped the IB grow its influence and impact. We also delivered tangible business results that the IB could build upon.

As in other organizations, I also used the project to create cohesion between people and build a stronger team. Large content projects are an opportunity to create new content strategies — they’re also an opportunity to bond a team and create a network of highly motivated, high performing content creators, designers and UXers who do better work and have more fun while doing it.