Introduction
Who is CHRU — and why does their website matter?
The Clinical HIV Research Unit is the leading infectious diseases clinical research unit in South Africa — one of the most significant in the world given the country's position at the centre of global HIV research and treatment development. The work CHRU does is genuinely consequential: clinical trials, research programmes, and patient care that advances the global understanding of infectious diseases.
An organisation doing work at that level needs a website that is equal to it. What CHRU had before BrandingLab became involved was the opposite: a site that was difficult to navigate, visually dated, and not doing justice to the credibility, scale, or importance of the institution it represented.
The brief came through Turquoise PR Communications, who were managing CHRU's broader communications and recognised that the website was the weakest link in an otherwise strong institutional presence. The ask: redesign the site in a way that gave the organisation the digital credibility it deserved, while making it genuinely usable for the three distinct audiences who needed to navigate it — patients, researchers, and funders.
What does a clinical research unit website need to do that most websites don't?
Most websites have one primary audience and one primary job. CHRU's site had to work simultaneously for patients who may be anxious and looking for accessible information about participation in trials or accessing care, for clinical researchers evaluating whether CHRU is a credible partner for collaborative research, and for institutional funders and donors assessing the organisation's track record and governance. Each audience reads the same site through an entirely different lens and with entirely different needs. A website that serves one of them well often fails the others.
Project: CHRU — full website redesign and Webflow development
Client: CHRU (via Turquoise PR Communications)
Duration: 6 months
Deliverable: Full Webflow website with CMS for research, news, and team content
Live: chru.co.za
Challenge
What was wrong with CHRU's previous website?
The problems with the existing site were structural, not cosmetic. Cosmetic problems — outdated visual design, inconsistent typography, poor photography — can be fixed with a redesign. Structural problems require the site to be rebuilt from the ground up, because they're embedded in how the site is organised, how information flows, and what the navigation asks visitors to understand before they can find what they need.
CHRU's previous site had structural problems throughout:
- Navigation that assumed prior knowledge. The top-level navigation categories made sense to people who already understood CHRU's organisational structure — but not to a patient arriving from a search engine who just needed to know whether CHRU offered the kind of care they were looking for. The site was organised around how CHRU thinks about itself rather than how its audiences think about their needs.
- No clear visual system. The site had accumulated visual inconsistencies over time — different typographic treatments on different pages, inconsistent colour usage, imagery that ranged from professional to amateur across different sections. The cumulative effect was a site that felt like it hadn't been tended to, which for a clinical research unit is a significant credibility problem.
- Authority signals buried or absent. CHRU's credentials — the scale of its research programmes, its international partnerships, its clinical trial history — were either missing from the site or presented in ways that didn't communicate their significance. A researcher evaluating CHRU as a potential partner needed to work hard to find the information that should have been front and centre.
- Patient journey not considered. The pathway for a patient who wanted to find out about participating in a clinical trial, or accessing care through CHRU, was unclear and anxiety-inducing. Healthcare websites have a specific obligation to the most vulnerable visitors — those who are researching a medical situation. CHRU's site wasn't meeting that obligation.
Why do healthcare and research institution websites fall behind?
Institutional websites tend to grow organically over years, with different people adding pages and sections without a coherent editorial or design framework. The result is a site that reflects the organisation's internal complexity rather than its external audiences' needs. Fixing this isn't a design problem — it's an information architecture problem, and it requires the time and discipline to work through every section of the site against the question: what does the visitor need to know here, and what do they need to be able to do next?
Approach
How do you design a healthcare website for multiple audiences without confusing any of them?
The first several weeks of the project were spent entirely on information architecture — mapping CHRU's content against the three primary visitor types and working out a navigation and page structure that gave each audience a clear path without creating a site so complex that it became overwhelming.
The solution was a layered architecture: a top-level navigation that was organised around recognisable categories (Research, Clinical Trials, Patient Information, About), with each section designed to serve its primary audience first while remaining accessible to others. A patient looking for information about clinical trial participation lands in a section designed specifically for them — with language, imagery, and structure calibrated to someone who may be anxious and unfamiliar with clinical research. A funder landing on the About section finds the institutional credibility signals — leadership, governance, track record — that they're looking for.
How was CHRU's visual identity handled?
CHRU had a defined brand identity with a distinctive purple and yellow colour palette. The challenge wasn't creating a new identity — it was implementing the existing one consistently and credibly across a complex multi-section site, in a way that the team could maintain over time without design support.
The implementation involved building a design system in Webflow: a set of reusable components — cards, section layouts, call-to-action patterns, typography hierarchy — that all drew from the same set of style definitions. Every page in the site was built from this component library, meaning that visual consistency was structural rather than dependent on discipline. If a team member updated a page using the established components, it would look right automatically.
What made the six-month timeline necessary for this project?
Three factors made this a genuinely long project. The first was content: CHRU had a substantial volume of existing content — research programme descriptions, trial information, team profiles, news — that needed to be audited, restructured, and in many cases rewritten before it could migrate to the new site. You can't design a website around content that doesn't yet exist in its final form.
The second was stakeholder review. As an institution with clinical governance responsibilities, CHRU had multiple stakeholders who needed to review and approve content — particularly anything relating to clinical trials or patient information. That review cycle takes time to complete properly.
The third was the CMS architecture. The new site needed to give CHRU's communications team the ability to publish research updates, add new team members, announce trials, and maintain the news section independently. Building and testing that CMS structure — ensuring it was genuinely usable by non-technical team members — required iteration that can't be rushed.
Feedback
What did the new CHRU website achieve?
CHRU can be proud of the site that launched. The purple and yellow colour palette — true to the brand — is implemented with consistency and sophistication across every section. Navigation is clear and structured around visitor needs rather than institutional organisation. Patients, researchers, and funders each have a clear, unambiguous path to the information most relevant to them.
The credibility signals that were previously buried or absent are now front and centre: research programme scale, clinical trial history, international partnerships, institutional leadership. A researcher or funder arriving at the site now encounters an institution that looks equal to the work it does.
For the communications team, the CMS gave them genuine editorial independence for the first time. Research updates, trial announcements, news, and team profile changes can all be managed without involving a developer. For an organisation where timely communication about research developments matters, that independence has operational value beyond the design.
What does this project demonstrate about long-form client relationships?
Six months is long enough to get things right in ways that shorter projects can't. It's long enough to discover, during implementation, that a section you planned one way works better another way. It's long enough to build the CMS, hand it over to the client, get their feedback on how it actually works in practice, and iterate on it. It's long enough to get the patient-facing copy reviewed by someone with clinical communication expertise and incorporate their feedback properly.
The result is a site that didn't just launch — it launched right. In healthcare, that distinction matters more than in most sectors.
FAQ
How long does a clinical research or healthcare institution website take to build?
A healthcare or research institution website with multiple audience types, substantial existing content, and clinical governance review requirements takes four to six months to do properly. The CHRU project took six months because the content audit, stakeholder review cycles, and CMS implementation all required time that couldn't be compressed without compromising the result. Websites that serve vulnerable audiences — including patients researching clinical trial participation — have an obligation to get communication right, and that takes the time it takes.
How do you design a website that works for patients, researchers, and funders simultaneously?
Information architecture before design. Before any visual decisions are made, the site's content needs to be organised around what each visitor type needs to find, in what order, and with what level of detail. The navigation structure, page hierarchy, and content layering all need to reflect the mental models of each audience — not the institution's internal organisational chart. For CHRU, that meant three distinct primary pathways through the same site, each designed for a specific visitor type's needs without conflicting with the others.
What CMS structure works best for a research institution publishing regular updates?
Research institutions using Webflow development typically need CMS collections for: team and researcher profiles, research programmes and focus areas, clinical trial listings with status updates, news and publications, and partner organisations. The key design principle is separating content that changes regularly (news, trial status, team profiles) from content that should remain stable (the institution's research mission, governance, and credentials). The CMS should give communications teams full control over the former while the design system protects the integrity of the latter.
How do you communicate clinical trial information accessibly to potential participants?
Patient-facing clinical trial content needs to answer three questions immediately: what is this trial studying, who is eligible to participate, and what does participation involve. The language needs to be plain enough for someone without a medical background to understand, while being accurate enough to satisfy clinical and regulatory requirements. Images, iconography, and layout can do significant work here — reducing the cognitive load on someone who may be anxious or unwell and making the information feel approachable rather than intimidating.
What makes a healthcare website credible to institutional funders and research partners?
Research partners and institutional funders are looking for evidence of rigour: the scale and track record of existing research programmes, the calibre of the research team, governance structures, international partnerships, and published outputs. This content needs to be prominent and well-organised — not buried three clicks into an About section. Credibility in this context is also communicated by design quality itself: a well-designed, consistently implemented website signals that the institution takes its communications seriously, which is a proxy for taking everything else seriously too.
