The Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child

The Challenge

To develop an engaging research centre website that can concisely display research areas and outcomes, easy to use and easy to maintain by site administrators.

Our Approach

We approach website design by considering this mantra – don’t make me think. We know that even though users spend less time on websites reading content, they are familiar with the way they work. So while we aim to make our site designs fresh, the basic functionalities should still feel and work as other sites, ensuring users focus on content and not on how to use the interface.

In this case, the website home page was designed to emphasize the research work the centre will do over the next few years. By utilising a brand already developed, we followed the colour scheme already in use and laid out the interface a fresh yet familiar way. The home page focuses on the big picture with a feature video, research areas, news and events prominently displayed, while internal pages focus on content elements like feature images, internal anchors, and ability to add or remove news items on the page.

The site uses a custom coded theme which is optimised for speed with minification and asymmetric loading of scripts practices employed to give the site the best chance of high native search engine ranking.