Small Business Development Corporation
Vital support services for WA small business.
Small Business Development Corporation (SBDC) is an independent statutory body providing support services to small business owners in Western Australia. Through advisory, workshops, support and advocacy, SBDC helps small businesses survive and thrive.
SBDC delivers a diverse range of services to a broad audience, and the old website did not reflect how users think about business problems. Users were calling SBDC's helpline for information the website should have surfaced.
A phased rebuild on District CMS.
We collaborated closely with the SBDC team to design and develop a task-based, navigable website on District CMS — built to meet future requirements and deliver functionality that addressed the shifting needs of small business owners through COVID lockdowns and transitions.
A phased delivery approach started with discovery and design to scope what development would deliver, then moved into build with structured user testing throughout.
Six outcomes the new site had to deliver.
Information portal.
User-centred online information and services through improved IA, UX and digital service capabilities.
Customer service.
Increase digital take-up by improving customer journeys and site functionality. Reduce traditional service requests.
Intuitive backend.
Simple-to-use backend interface with a variety of page templates and content components. Content-heavy pages presented clearly and engagingly.
Content restructure.
Task-based navigation with custom content types and intuitively restructure a content-heavy website.
Mobile friendly and accessible.
Fully accessible across mobile, tablet, laptop and desktop, complying with WCAG 2.0 AA standards.
Content migration.
Migrate and restructure content and resources into the new architecture.
A single source of truth for business regulations.
Purposeful design and considered information architecture transformed a content-heavy, hard-to-navigate site into a structured platform that works for the full range of SBDC's audiences. The new site meets the needs of small business owners and other stakeholders using it as a single source of truth for business regulations.
Inside the platform.
District CMS.
Built on District CMS, with custom modules and admin interface improvements that improve the editorial experience.
Configurable, component-driven, future-proof.
Eventbrite integration.
Eventbrite integrated into the CMS to support online workshop bookings.
Workshops administered alongside the rest of the content.
Document library.
Document management for templates, tools and guides.
Internal and external resources surfaced through a single library.
Advanced search.
Fuzzy matching and spellchecking, autocomplete, keyword fields and boosting to rank certain results higher.
Search facets filter the results page across the content estate.
Custom content types.
A range of custom content types simplifies the navigation and the editorial workflow.
Content-heavy pages, restructured intuitively.
Accessibility.
WCAG 2.0 AA compliance across every device.
Mobile, tablet, laptop, desktop — all reachable, all readable.
Re-engineered from the ground up.
Through research, user-centred design and technology, we re-engineered the site from the ground up. The result is a website that has and continues to play a critical role in supporting Western Australian small businesses, through the pandemic and beyond.
At a glance.
Content-heavy site to untangle?
Let's talk.
Government, statutory authority, broad audience, deep content. We turn it into a site people can navigate.