The Challenge

AES’s six services (Accommodation, Internships, Study Centre, Tours, Student Services, plus the umbrella brand) each lived on its own separate website. Users landing on one service had no visibility of the others, which undermined cross-referral and diluted the sense of one credible organisation. AES needed everything unified into a single site that made the full offering legible, without losing the SEO equity each legacy site had built up individually.

The Outcome

The consolidated site launched successfully and unified all six services under one navigation and visual system. The underlying IA and UI system have remained substantially unchanged for around ten years since, surviving a full brand refresh (new logo and colour) without structural change. The live site today still shows the same consolidated multi-service navigation structure.

The Approach

Subcontracted by Umi Digital, who held the hosting and client relationship but lacked delivery capacity, designed and built a single responsive website consolidating all six existing sites into one coherent information architecture. Each service kept a clear, distinct entry point within a shared navigation and visual system, so the structure communicated AES’s full offering without collapsing the individual services into an undifferentiated mass. Planned and implemented a URL redirect strategy to migrate each legacy site’s accumulated SEO equity onto the new unified domain without loss of ranking.