Eight ways to learn. One way to book.
ISM has been teaching Ireland to drive since 1961: cars, and seven commercial vehicle categories that each carry a different licence, a different price and a different kind of customer. We took the site from content architecture and wireframes through to design, front end and back end.
At a glance Irish School of Motoring 2025
In short
The brief
One school, eight different licences.
A seventeen-year-old booking a first car lesson and a haulage operator putting a driver through an artic licence are not the same customer, do not use the same words, and do not convert on the same page. ISM sells to both, plus six categories in between, and runs two sister companies alongside. Deciding what belongs on this site, and what belongs one link away, is a content architecture problem before it is a design one, which is why the project opened with a sitemap rather than a moodboard.
The scope
Teaching since 1961, and a phone screen.
The size of the operation is what makes the structure worth arguing about. A national instructor network, eight vehicle categories and two sister companies, all of it reaching most people through a screen the width of a hand.
1961
Teaching Ireland to drive since
200+
Approved driving instructors
8
Vehicle categories taught
ISM’s own published figures, from the About page of the site we built.
The architecture
Eight categories, one spine.
Eight separate lesson pages is eight chances to drift, and one page trying to mean eight things converts none of them. The structure splits the difference: one template carrying every category, one booking panel repeated everywhere it could plausibly be needed, and two clearly marked exits to the sister businesses. All of it decided in the sitemap, before a single colour.
01
One template, eight categories
Car, rigid truck, artic truck, light truck, coach and bus, trailer and caravan, ambulance and minibus. Each carries its own copy, its own imagery and its own booking route, on one template, so a ninth category costs an entry, not a build.
02
Booking as the spine
The same three-step panel (vehicle, quantity, county and city) sits in the hero, on every lesson page, and in the phone's bottom bar. Request a callback runs beside it everywhere, because a learner's parent is often the one paying and rarely the one on the site.
03
Two doors out of one build
ISM Training and ISM Recruitment are separate businesses. They get a permanent slot in the top bar, a slot in the phone's bottom bar, and a card wherever the content earns one, and nothing else. Absorbing them would have made every learner wade through two businesses that are not theirs.
The build
The same system, drawn twice.
The phone build is not the desktop one narrowed. It gains a persistent five-slot bar carrying both conversion routes and both sister businesses, and it reorders every page around the fact that the booking panel is the reason anyone came. Open any frame to read the whole page.
Start to finish
Sitemap to server, all of it ours.
Content architecture, sitemap, wireframes, UI design, front end and back end. One team, one continuous chain of decisions, nothing lost in a handover between suppliers.
Engineered
One JetEngine-driven lesson template behind all eight vehicle categories.
A booking panel that carries vehicle, quantity and location, repeated in the hero, on every lesson page and in the phone bottom bar.
A location finder on a map of Ireland, filtered by lesson type.
A free mock theory test, a reason to come back before there is a reason to book.
A five-slot bottom bar on phones, so both conversion routes and both sister businesses stay one tap away.
Designed
The back end carries what the front end hides.
Three front doors only stay coherent if one content model sits underneath them. Sector and county taxonomies drive the instructor and lesson pages, one template carries every vehicle category rather than eight pages drifting apart, and the ISM team edits the lot from the same place without a developer.
Stack
See it live
Book something you cannot drive yet.
The site is live. Pick a category you have no licence for and follow the booking panel. That path is the whole argument of this case.
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