H+ Website Relaunch

The starting point

H+ represents hospitals and clinics across Switzerland, which makes its website much more than a corporate presence. It needs to communicate the association's positions and activities to the public while also providing services, information and resources to its members.

I joined the project as a consultant and have been responsible for the planning, project management and technical concept behind the relaunch.

One of the first tasks was to bring the different requirements together and turn them into a project that could be approached in manageable stages. The public website was the first major step, followed by a complete rethink of the members area and further integrations.

Planning beyond the website

Projects like this rarely consist of just designing a new frontend.

The new platform needs to work for the communications team today while also providing the technical foundation for services that will be added over time. This meant thinking about content structures, permissions, integrations and future requirements early in the project rather than treating them as separate problems later.

My role has been to keep that bigger picture in view while working through the practical decisions with H+ and the team at PAKD.

Design and development with PAKD

The design and development of the new website were handled by our team at PAKD.

Working closely with the same team throughout the project made it possible to move directly between consulting, concept, design and development. Questions that came up during implementation could be discussed in the context of the original requirements rather than being passed through several layers.

My own role stayed focused on the client and the project as a whole: planning the work, helping make technical and strategic decisions, coordinating the different parts and making sure the solution could support what was planned next.

A new members area

The next major phase is a complete relaunch of the H+ members area.

Today, a substantial amount of information about H+ members is managed in Abacus. The new platform will connect directly to Abacus through an API and integrate this data into Craft CMS.

This creates an interesting technical challenge because the CMS and the business system need to work together without unnecessarily duplicating information or making editorial work more complicated.

The plan is to make the integration feel like a natural part of the Craft CMS backend, giving the H+ team one place to work while keeping Abacus as the relevant source for member data.

The new members area will also provide the foundation for protected content and services that are only available to specific members or user groups.

Building in stages

I like the phased approach to this project because it gives us room to solve one part properly while keeping the longer-term architecture in mind.

The public website is already live, while the members platform and its Abacus integration are still being developed. Further functionality can then be added on top of the same foundation instead of creating another isolated platform every time a new requirement appears.

My role continues throughout these phases, from defining what comes next to working through the technical details with the development team.

For me, H+ is a good example of a project where consulting and implementation naturally overlap. The important decisions are not all made at the beginning, and having someone involved who knows the requirements, the technical concept and the history behind those decisions makes it much easier to keep moving in a consistent direction.