Royal Brompton & Harefield Education

A platform built for reputation

Design Culture was asked to plan and deliver a comprehensive new WordPress platform that better reflects RB&HH Education’s evolving ambitions and positions it as a global authority. 

The existing website had evolved organically over time, but performance limitations, plugin dependencies and the absence of clear user journeys meant it no longer met the expectations of a specialist global audience – it also meant a confused, inflexible CMS that limited the team’s ability to create and promote great content.

We delivered the new platform through:

• Rationalising a complex content landscape spanning courses, fellowships, observerships, webinars and research
• Elevating the use of the RB&HH Education brand to build credibility and trust
• Delivering a well-designed, intuitive, fast experience for time-pressured specialist healthcare professionals
• A robust, well-planned and fully integrated technical ecosystem – from learning management system, to search, payments and more
• Future-proofing the platform to support new content types and further integrations as RB&HH Education continues to grow.

Our approach

Audience-led requirements defined the direction for the new platform. We identified key user journeys across audience types – from cardiologists and international fellows to course participants and administrators – and developed a rationalised site map and information architecture that guides each group purposefully through the site.

With brand at the heart of the experience, we developed a modular design system built for flexibility and consistency. The result is a bespoke, clean and future-ready WordPress platform with performance, accessibility, security and scalability at its core.

Key technical deliverables

• Algolia AI-powered search and filtering – enabling time-pressed clinicians to surface relevant content quickly and reliably, with semantic search capabilities and predictive suggestions
• LearnDash LMS – fully integrated and restyled to align with the RB&HH Education brand, delivering a seamless transition between the main site and learning environment
• WPML multilingual support – across selected templates, enabling Arabic-language content for Middle Eastern audiences
• Cloudinary CDN – for efficient, high-performance global media delivery
• Stripe – payment integration properly resolved and configured
• Gravity Forms – for distinct fellowship and general enquiry pathways, with file upload capability and built-in validation
• YouTube – replacing Vimeo, enabling improved performance insights and deeper GA4 connectivity
• Yoast SEO – with rich meta tag management and multilingual SEO support throughout
• Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager and Google Search Console, with a customised Data Studio dashboard making reporting accessible and actionable for the team.

A platform that delivers – and keeps delivering

The new RB&HH Education website positions the organisation for sustainable growth, with the tools, flexibility and insight to keep evolving. It delivers a flagship digital presence that clearly communicates RB&HH Education’s status as a world-leading authority in heart and lung care and delivers an optimised and accessible user experience that meets the expectations of its international audience.

The design and development approach has both future-proofed the platform to support new content and functionality, multilingual expansion and further integrations, and empowered the RB&HH Education team with a CMS that’s intuitive to use, with full and flexible control over their editorial workflow and content expansion.