For research-led organisations, the challenge isn’t publishing content; it’s making it easy to find, navigate and use. We help you structure and connect your content so it works more effectively.
When content grows, websites often struggle to keep up
Research-led organisations produce plenty of high-quality content. Over time, though, that can make their websites become harder to use; content builds up across teams, topics and formats. What started as a manageable structure becomes more fragmented, and it takes more effort for users to find what they need.
After a while, the following issues can come up:
- Important content can end up sitting a few layers down
- Related work is no longer linked together efficiently
- Journalists struggle to find the right expert quickly
- Policymakers can’t find the insights they’re looking for quickly
- Internal teams work around the system rather than with it
- AI can’t follow the connections it needs to cite your work.
None of this is intentional. It is simply what happens when content grows but the structure behind it can’t keep pace.
The problem is structural, not just visual
It is tempting to see this as a design issue. In reality, it tends to run deeper.
Many websites are built page by page, or in sections of similar content. That approach works well early on, but becomes harder to maintain as content expands. Small inconsistencies build up, relationships between content are lost, and duplication can become more common.
Improving the visual design can help at a point in time, but it rarely addresses the underlying issue. What is needed is a clearer and more consistent way of organising and finding that content, so that it reflects how it is created and used.
A more structured way to approach your website
Our work usually starts by stepping back and understanding how content actually works within your organisation. We look at how it is created, how it is managed, and how your audiences expect to find and use it. From there, we help define a structure that brings more consistency and clarity.
That structure then informs how navigation works, how content is connected, and how users move through the site. The aim is not to add complexity, but to reduce it – for both your audience and your team.
We also look at how your CMS and workflows can support this. In some cases, small changes in this area can make a significant difference to how easy the site is to manage over time, improving editorial workflow and governance.
Our approach
We focus on helping research-led organisations make better use of the content they already have.
That typically involves:
Identifying and understanding your audiences
We get to understand each of your audiences, their priorities and what they’re looking for.
Understanding your content ecosystem
How content is created, managed, edited and used across your organisation. This includes understanding the editorial process and associated governance.
Defining a clearer structure
Bringing consistency to how content is organised and related. Some of this can be automated and some will require input from authors and editors.
Improving navigation and discovery
Making it easier for users to find and move between content, including improving search. This is key with sites that have a lot of content in various formats.
Supporting your team
Ensuring your CMS and workflows support your team rather than hinder it. The system should support the editorial process and automate promotion to the right audiences.
Automating content delivery
Your CMS should make it easy to segment audiences, and share your content with the right people at the right time via email and social media.
A more integrated approach to email and social media
Email and social media are often the cornerstone of communication with audiences for research-led organisations. Unfortunately, it can also be one of the time consuming aspects of promoting their work.
Email databases are often made up of multiple different types of individuals that are only interested in part of what an organisation does. For organisations producing a lot of content that can be a problem; most of what’s sent to an individual won’t land if it’s not an area they have interest in, reducing impact of your content with your audience and potentially resulting in higher unsubscribe rates.
Segmentation becomes an important part of the system; recording and using information about what individuals on the list are interested in receiving, and how often. Using that data effectively in your communications means that content can be targeted. To make the most impact, and reduce administrative costs, emails should be automatically triggered by content publication using audience segments matched to specific taxonomies.
Finally, it’s key that your content is effectively promoted on social media. By linking your site to various social media platforms, it becomes easier to promote new content; sensible defaults make posting easier, and repeating the message once across multiple platforms (with the ability to alter it where necessary) makes the most impact in the least time.
When we built the HEPI website, we built in automations for promotion of key pieces of content across email and social media. Content is published according to a schedule and disseminated via email to relevant individuals. It’s also pushed out to a number of social media accounts linked to HEPI immediately, with a sensible templated message that can be easily altered.
The impact
When the structure is right, associated benefits can be felt quickly,
- Content becomes easier to find, both through navigation and search
- Related work starts to surface more naturally, helping users explore topics in more depth
- Teams spend less time duplicating content or working around limitations in the system
- Search and AI visibility of your website and content improve
Perhaps most importantly, you get more value from the content you are already producing. The site does a better job of supporting it and surfacing it to the right people, rather than getting in the way or burying it deeper over time.
Visibility of your content is key for human audiences, but it’s also important for AI and search engines too. If it’s easier to move around your site and understand how different pieces of content are related to each other, as well as the broader context of your work, those pages are far more likely to be cited in answers in Google’s AI Mode, Claude and Perplexity (amongst others). On top of that, technical implementation (such as on page schema code) is starting to play a bigger part in how likely AI is to cite your content. That visibility translates into journalists and policymakers finding your research via AI and, ultimately, delivering more impact.
Where this approach tends to work best
This way of working is particularly useful for organisations that publish a lot of content, with some having multiple teams contributing to it. It is also relevant where websites have grown over time and are starting to feel harder to manage, or where there is a sense that valuable content is not as visible or as widely used as it could be.
You don’t need to be planning a full redesign for this to be worthwhile. In many cases, understanding the current situation more clearly is the most useful place to start. That sometimes looks like a one-off project to identify audiences and how well the current site serves them. Sometimes, it can just be a case of looking at how the system works or parts of the design, and addressing those issues over time to better fit requirements. We’ll be able to guide you through your options, and which is the right choice in your situation.
Our experience with complex content
We regularly work with organisations managing large volumes of content across multiple teams. Our experience working with organisations like HEPI, Oxera and Higher Education institutions like the University of Michigan Law School, along with our background in UX, makes us ideally suited to resolving the issues large websites typically face.
In these environments, the challenge is rarely about producing great content, as it is with other sites. It is about structuring it properly, maintaining consistency, and making it easier for people to find and use what is already there. That is where we can add the most value.
Looking at the structure of a site, often just addressing the taxonomies (or classifications) of content helps enormously. This creates a foundation that connects similar content together, powers effective search on the site, and helps both search engines and AI understand the link between your various pieces of content. When used with functional improvements to site search, navigation, layout and on-page schema code, we can resolve a lot of the complexities of large content sites.
Headscape’s content discoverability audit
One way we help organisations do that is through Headscape’s Content Discoverability Audit.
The Discoverability Audit is a focused review of how easy it is for people to find, navigate and use your content. We look at how content is organised, how it connects, and how well the site supports different types of users. We also address
The output is a short report with clear, practical recommendations, followed by a session to talk through what we have found and what it might mean for you.