24,000 websites. 56,000 domain names. None of it sustainable.
Pearson knew they had a problem. The scale of it was staggering. They wanted one website to rule them all. It was a reasonable ambition. It was also, as it turned out, impossible, and understanding why took an adventure through the entire land of Pearson.
The problem
One website to rule them all. Except the world doesn't work that way.
For a single global website to exist, every education system in the world would need to be identical: the age students start, the stages they move through, what those stages are called, and the qualifications they lead to. Spoiler: they're not. The biggest blocker is ages and stages. Every market does it differently, and no amount of clever information architecture can flatten that out into a single structure.
One site wasn't the answer. But that didn't mean the status quo was acceptable either. 24,000 websites and 56,000 domain names is not a content strategy. It's an archaeology project.
The question became: if not one site, then what? And how do you get there from here?
The work
Go on an adventure. Don't come back until you've got a map.
The brief was refreshingly direct: go and become a subject matter expert in global education systems and the land of Pearson. Come back with an answer. Two steps down from the board, with the business fully bought in to the need for change, and the freedom to go places a permanent employee couldn't go and ask things they'd get in hot water for asking.
That meant actually looking at the websites. Not just trusting the numbers. Peering into dark dusty caverns, poking around small shops that looked derelict, surveying vast mountain ranges of information. Understanding what each site did, who it served, and how important it actually was.
The answer was two websites per market, one for each major vertical Pearson operated in: education and clinical. The map, a spreadsheet, showed what the largest market structure would look like and which sites would fold into it, and when. Reverse scaled, which meant designed for the worst-case scenario first and then worked out how it would shrink to fit smaller markets.
The structure was still valid and still being worked on five years after it was designed.
Structures designed with room to move, a bit like trousers you wear to Christmas lunch, stretchy with plenty of give, build longevity into what a business wants to do without fully constraining it.
Sound familiar?
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