Johns Hopkins School of Nursing Digital Magazine
A website that's right on pulse.
How do you revive an outdated digital magazine?
Client Challenge
Johns Hopkins School of Nursing (JHSON) needed to bring its vibrant, story-driven magazine to life, digitally, and to integrate its editorial voice into the broader brand ecosystem. Their goal: inspire alumni, students, nurses, and donors alike with a more dynamic and discoverable storytelling experience.
Planit's Solution
Building on our recent redesign of the main Johns Hopkins School of Nursing website—as well as prior discovery and UX strategy work—Planit created a fully reimagined digital home for the JHSON Nursing Magazine. The goal: blend form and function, design and structure, to elevate the publication’s voice within the broader nursing ecosystem.
Our team designed and delivered a flexible, taxonomy-powered content hub that supports longform editorial, podcast integration, rich contributor bios, and a searchable archive of print issues. We brought the magazine under the umbrella of the new Nursing website, ensuring consistency with brand standards while giving the publication space to shine with its own bold, distinct, and modern editorial identity.
Modular Templates for Editorial Freedom
Designed flexible templates across mobile and desktop—including podcast landing pages, article formats, magazine issues, archives, and contributor pages—to support multiple storytelling formats.
Editorial-Driven Article Layout
To elevate the reading experience and align with the school’s vision for a premium digital publication, Planit designed a refined article layout with a narrower content width. This approach enhances readability while creating a spacious, modern feel. The layout supports large, high-impact imagery and oversized callout captions—drawing readers deeper into the story and giving the magazine a bold, editorial presence. Flexible content modules allow for dynamic storytelling while maintaining consistency across longform features, shorter updates, and multimedia-rich pieces.
Migration & Cleanup of Legacy Content
Executed a full migration from magazine.nursing.jhu.edu into the new Nursing website experience. To preserve existing SEO equity, all legacy URLs were carefully mapped and redirected using 301 redirects to corresponding content within the new structure. The migration process also included a full content audit, cleanup of outdated styling, and optimization of legacy articles, blog posts, and podcast entries—ensuring everything looked and functioned seamlessly within the updated modular design.
Smart Taxonomies & Advanced Search
Implemented custom taxonomies to organize content by issue, contributor, format, and theme—powering a robust search experience and easy cross-linking throughout the broader JHSON site.
Podcast + Blog Integration
To position the magazine site as a centralized, search-optimized content hub, Planit seamlessly integrated the “On the Pulse” blog and Healthcare Podcast into the experience. Custom post types and structured metadata improved indexing and discoverability, while dynamic filtering allowed users to explore content by topic, contributor, or issue. Audio playback was built directly into podcast episodes to support engagement, and spotlight modules were placed strategically across the site to surface related blog and podcast content—boosting internal linking and reinforcing relevance for users and search engines alike.
Soft Publish + Mailchimp Integration
Added backend flexibility for editorial teams, including a soft-publish feature that allows non-WordPress users to preview content before it goes live. To support ongoing engagement and readership growth, we also integrated Mailchimp automation—enabling the site to automatically trigger email sends to subscribers when new magazine articles, blog posts, or podcast episodes are published. This ensured content promotion happened in real time without the need for manual email creation, helping the school maintain consistent, timely communication with its audience.
Tammy L. Berwanger, MS, Former Assistant Dean of Marketing & Communications
Johns Hopkins School of Nursing
Tammy L. Berwanger, MS, Former Assistant Dean of Marketing & Communications
Johns Hopkins School of Nursing
