Academy of Retail Excellence
A ground-up rebuild of a retail-education academy's site: 448 static pages in two fully translated languages, built from a complete content archive of the original.
The same project, from different angles
One document per perspective, because the roles I played on this are not the same role.
The existing site had thin, repetitive, keyword-stuffed copy, a sitemap pointing at a dead course slug while the real one went unlisted, and 91 job listings across eleven paginated pages that no search engine could index individually.
The first deliverable was not a design — it was a content archive: every course name, fee, duration, curriculum, address, accreditation and person captured from the live site before anything was touched. Four rules held throughout. All prose is newly written. Every number, name, address, fee, module and date from the archive survives exactly. Nothing is invented — a missing value renders a marked placeholder and gets listed in a gaps file. And no fabricated social proof: of twelve testimonials recorded, only the four the archive could name went in.
47 page templates rendering 448 static pages. A course finder scored in the browser with its reasoning printed under every result. Course comparison, career explorer, salary guide, and a job board with structured data. Fee tables published both exclusive and inclusive of tax. Certificate verification, admissions, CV submission and franchise enquiry flows.
The whole rebuild: content archaeology, information architecture, the design system, the bilingual architecture and the engineering.
1,664 of 1,664 page strings translated with none orphaned, using English sentences as lookup keys so a missing translation falls back to correct English rather than a raw key. 209 tests, 218 routes audited clean.
Complete and building. Not yet deployed — the handover lists what the owners need to decide first, including noindexing any staging copy so it cannot compete with the live site.