IFHRS

Making the network understandable

The central challenge was to show how IFHRS relates to its member societies. The site had to answer simple questions quickly: what IFHRS is, who belongs to it and who leads it, where the member societies are, which congresses have taken place and what comes next.

Those questions are simple until an organization has several societies, countries, leadership structures and decades of history behind it. Information architecture therefore became the core of the project. We designed the site around those relationships instead of treating each section as an isolated page.

A living archive of the field

The website also became a place to preserve the history of international hair research. Its history section traces how the major hair research societies and their international meetings led to the federation in 2013, and the congress archive carries that story forward.

For a scientific organization, history establishes continuity. The people, societies and congresses that came before are part of who the organization is today, so the site had to work as a current communications platform and as a living archive at the same time.

A change of hands

Later the platform moved to another team and was migrated to WordPress. Along the way parts of the original structure and experience changed, and over the years the site drifted away from the system we had designed.

This happens in real projects more often than anyone plans for. A platform can be moved from one technology to another and gradually lose the logic that made it work, because a migration changes the technology while the product only improves if someone protects what worked before. We have written about what usually gets lost in such moves in the migration checklist most agencies skip, and about why a site's problems start long before a developer leaves in Your Website Doesn't Fail When Your Developer Leaves.

What we learned

The cheapest initial decision is not always the cheapest over the life of a website. A custom system costs more to build, a familiar CMS looks cheaper to maintain, and a migration can look like a practical shortcut. When the architecture is simplified in the wrong places or the original logic gets lost, an organization can end up paying to rebuild what it already had.

Sometimes "cheaper" simply means that someone else will eventually have to finish the job. That is why we ask not only what a website costs to build, but what it will cost to own, a question we take apart in How Much Does a Custom Website Cost.

Back on the project

IFHRS has come back to us, and we are now fixing and supporting the platform. That gives us an unusual advantage: we know both its history and its original architecture, why certain decisions were made and what the system was designed to do, and we can look at the current platform with fresh eyes. One of the first steps was documenting the current codebase for AI-assisted development with an AGENTS.md file, an approach we describe in A Codebase Manual for AI.

We are not starting by asking what to redesign. We start with what is actually there: what still works, what has changed, what can be improved, what should be rebuilt and what should be left alone. The answer may be modernizing the code, restructuring parts of the interface, rebuilding the platform, or a combination of the three. It should come from the organization, its users and the system itself, as we explain in Do You Need a Website Redesign?

What we did

• Strategy and information architecture
• UX/UI design
• Custom Laravel development
• Responsive web development
• Content architecture for an international organization
• Support and modernization

Industry: scientific research, healthcare, international organizations. Status: originally built by Peretz Agency, now back with us for fixes, support and modernization. Related project: the Institute of Trichology website.