AIAA

The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) is a premier organization representing professionals in the aerospace industry. Their website, aiaa.org, serves as a vast digital hub, offering thousands of pages covering events, webinars, sponsorships, certifications, publications, technical courses, and podcasts.

The original site was developed on a legacy .NET platform with outdated structure, limited flexibility, and cumbersome backend management. The client’s key objectives were:

• A complete design and technology overhaul
• Simplified content management for a large editorial and marketing team
• A modern, responsive layout and improved user experience
• High scalability to support their growing content needs

I took on the challenge to completely rebuild the AIAA website on a modern WordPress architecture, delivering a solution that is robust, fast, and highly maintainable.

Key Benefits Delivered

• Improved Site Speed & Performance: Efficient coding practices, lightweight frameworks, and performance tuning ensured a smooth user experience even under heavy content loads.
• SEO-Friendly Foundation: Built with search engine visibility in mind, helping AIAA maintain and improve organic reach.
• Clean Codebase: Modular, well-organized code ensures easy future enhancements and collaboration with other developers.
• Scalable Structure: Designed to manage and expand content over time without degrading performance.
• Backend Simplicity: Empowered non-technical staff to manage site content easily without reliance on developers.
• Future-Proof Design: Leveraged WordPress best practices and reusable components for long-term sustainability.

My Responsibilities

• Rebuilt the entire website from scratch using WordPress CMS.
• Developed a modular and scalable theme architecture with clean, well-documented code.
• Implemented custom Gutenberg blocks as well as ACF management to enable non-technical staff to easily manage complex layouts and content sections.
• Structured the site to support thousands of dynamic and static pages with logical content hierarchies and internal linking.
• Optimized the site for high performance, using caching, image optimization, and best practices in WordPress development.
• Ensured full SEO optimization, including schema markup, metadata, clean URLs, and fast loading speeds.
• Delivered a fully responsive design that performs seamlessly across all devices and browsers.
• Integrated tools for analytics, membership portals, and ongoing content publishing workflows.
• Provided documentation and training for the client’s in-house content team.

Results

The new AIAA website is a significant transformation from its legacy system delivering a modern, high-performing, and scalable digital platform that meets the organization’s complex needs. The switch to WordPress empowered the internal team to manage thousands of pages with ease, thanks to a flexible and intuitive backend built with custom Gutenberg blocks. Load times were dramatically improved, the content structure was made SEO-friendly, and the fully responsive design ensures a seamless experience across all devices.

With a strong foundation in place, AIAA can now support ongoing growth, regularly publish new content, and better engage with its members and global audience. The successful launch of this site positioned the organization for long-term digital success while reducing ongoing maintenance overhead.

Due to the successful delivery of this complex project and the high level of satisfaction from their internal teams, the AIAA has since entrusted me with the development of four additional websites. These new projects span various departments and initiatives, further strengthening our collaboration and reflecting the client’s confidence in my work and technical capabilities.