Complex Website
A multi-section corporate or institutional website with deep content, multiple user segments and high expectations on both usability and search visibility. The kind of project where doing one thing right without the others produces a site that looks good, works poorly, or is invisible to the people it is meant to serve.
The situation
The organisation has a website that no longer reflects what it actually does. Or it is building one from scratch and realises, partway through, that the problem is harder than it initially appeared. The content is substantial. The audiences are different from each other — clients, partners, regulators, press, job candidates. The site must communicate credibility, explain complex services clearly and convert visitors who arrive with varying levels of prior knowledge.
Search visibility is part of the brief, but no one is quite sure how it fits with the design work. Analytics exist but are not being acted on. Accessibility has never been formally addressed. The organisation knows what it wants the site to achieve but does not have a clear methodology for getting there.
This is one of the most common situations Esario encounters — and one of the most consistently underestimated in terms of what it takes to do well.
What makes it complex
A complex website is not complex because it has many pages. It is complex because the decisions made in the early phases — how information is organised, how users are expected to navigate, what the primary conversion paths are — determine the success or failure of everything that comes after. A technically excellent website built on a poorly designed information architecture will confuse its users. A well-structured site with no search strategy will be invisible. A visible, well-structured site with no measurement architecture will have no feedback loop for improvement.
The services required for this kind of project are not sequential options to be selected from a menu. They are interdependent disciplines that need to be designed together, from the beginning, with an understanding of how each one shapes the others.
How Esario approaches it — five phases
The project begins not with design but with understanding. Who are the real users of this site — not the assumed ones, but the people who actually arrive, with their actual goals and constraints? What does the organisation need the site to do commercially and institutionally? What content exists, what needs to be created, and what can be retired?
Esario conducts user research, stakeholder interviews, content audits and competitive analysis. The output is not a report: it is the shared understanding that makes every subsequent decision defensible.
Deliverables: User research summary · Content audit · Audience personas · Competitive landscape analysis
The information architecture defines how content is organised, how users navigate and how the site's taxonomy supports both human understanding and search engine indexing. Navigation systems, controlled vocabularies and content hierarchies are designed with the data from Phase 1, then validated with users before any visual work begins.
UX design then translates the architecture into interaction flows, page templates and the detailed design of every critical user journey. Accessibility is not a post-launch audit: it is integrated into every design decision, ensuring WCAG 2.1 AA compliance is achieved structurally, not retrofitted.
Deliverables: Site map · Navigation system · Wireframes · Interaction flows · Accessibility specification · High-fidelity mockups
Before any page goes to development, the design is tested. Usability sessions with representative users surface the assumptions that were wrong, the flows that seemed obvious and weren't, the labels that meant something different to the people reading them than to the people who wrote them.
This phase feeds directly back into Phase 2 — it is not a gate at the end of the process but a loop within it. The design is refined until it is not just visually coherent but demonstrably usable by the people it is designed for.
Deliverables: Usability test report · Accessibility audit · Design revision log · Validated prototype
The information architecture designed in Phase 2 is also an SEO architecture. Taxonomy decisions, URL structures, internal linking strategies and content hierarchies are all search signals — and they are far harder to change after launch than before. Esario builds the SEO strategy in parallel with the IA work, not after it.
For GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation), this means structuring content so that AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — can parse, trust and cite it. For traditional search, it means technical optimisation, keyword architecture, structured data and content strategy aligned with the topics the target audience is actively searching.
Deliverables: SEO architecture document · Keyword strategy · Structured data specification · Content brief templates · GEO readiness audit
A website without a measurement architecture is a website without a feedback loop. Esario implements GA4 and server-side tracking that connects every channel, page and conversion event to the business outcomes the site is supposed to produce. Not page views — goals. Not sessions — qualified leads, content downloads, contact form completions, whatever the organisation actually cares about.
After launch, ongoing analysis identifies where the site is performing against its objectives and where it is not — producing a continuous stream of prioritised improvement actions rather than a one-time report.
Deliverables: GA4 implementation · Custom dashboard · Conversion tracking · Monthly performance reporting · Prioritised optimisation backlog
Engagement flow — Complex Website
The five-phase engagement flow for a complex website. Services activate at each phase in sequence — with a deliberate feedback loop between Evaluation (Phase 3) and Architecture (Phase 2) to validate design decisions before development begins.
What you get
| Deliverable | Relevant for |
|---|---|
| Information architecture document | CMO, CTO, content team |
| Validated wireframes and interaction flows | CTO, development team |
| High-fidelity design system and page mockups | CMO, board, development team |
| Accessibility specification and audit report | CTO, legal / compliance |
| SEO and GEO architecture document | CMO, content team |
| Usability test findings and design revisions | CMO, CTO |
| GA4 implementation and tracking specification | CMO, data team |
| Monthly performance reports and optimisation backlog | CMO, C-suite |
What this is not
This scenario describes Esario's methodology — not a fixed scope or a standard package. Every complex website project is different. Some organisations arrive with substantial existing research; others need everything built from scratch. Some have development teams in place; others need recommendations on build approach. The phases above describe what we do and why; the scope of each engagement is agreed individually, starting from an honest conversation about where you are now and what you are actually trying to achieve.
Does this sound like your project?
We have been through this process many times, in many sectors. Tell us about your situation and we will tell you honestly what the right approach looks like.
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