New website and tools rating our built environment

New website and tools rating our built environment

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A GovCMS Drupal redesign and rebuild for Australia's sustainable building rating provider.

What we did:
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Design Brief

NABERS is a national rating system that measures the environmental performance of Australian buildings and tenancies. With their existing website on Drupal 7 reaching end-of-life, NABERS came to Digital Garden to redesign and develop a new website on the latest version of GovCMS on Drupal. 

NABERS sought to improve the website in several areas, including its navigation, information architecture and design of key pages. Digital Garden performed several UX activities including an expert UX review, usability testing and tree jack testing.  A content audit framework was developed to audit, analyse and rewrite content for the new website. Following this, SEO and keyword research was performed to build a successful SEO strategy for the site moving forward.

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User research focused

User research focused

Digital Garden performed usability testing with NABERS stakeholders, including new customers, existing customers and assessors. This allowed us to understand how users find content on the website and learn more about their needs and requirements.

Two information architecture concepts were also tested to validate their structure, with the most successful going on to become the new structure for the website.

Data visualisation

Data visualisation

The NABERS website hosts a breadth of information about the built environment for the general public and for those who work in the building and environment sectors. Digital Garden rebuilt existing tools like-for-like on the website.

Commitment agreements

A tool that pulls directly from a CSV file uploaded to the backend of the CMS. Upon upload, a content type is created for each individual line item in the CSV and details are mapped to relevant fields so that they show correctly on the frontend of the tool. 

The system recognises when an item has been updated or removed - it only changes those details that are needed, and unpublishes data that is no longer relevant.

Reverse calculator

The purpose of this tool is to allow users to calculate how they can achieve a NABERS rating based on features such as energy or water usage and emissions.

There are two main components - a complex webform and an API integration. The API contains a large data set that calculates results based on the inputs that a user inserts into the tools webform. The form based frontend of the tool is a digestible, engaging, and accessible representation of a data set that was previously housed in an Excel spreadsheet.

Content audit

Content audit

A content audit was completed by Digital Garden and NABERS on the existing website content. Within this phase of the project, Digital Garden provided the NABERS team with a content audit framework that assisted them in analysing and re-writing the current website content in preparation for the new site.

SEO and keyword research

SEO and keyword research

Digital Garden performed keyword research by exploring what was already driving traffic to the NABERS site and similar sites such as NABERS New Zealand to create a pool of seed keywords. Then, using keyword research tools, further keyword sets were uncovered that were likely to be used to reach the NABERS website itself.

The biggest source of traffic identified was NABERS branded terms, having 56% of search volume. This, along with the other terms explored, allowed Digital Garden to design a relevant IA and arm NABERS with a solid SEO strategy.

GovCMS Drupal SaaS

GovCMS Drupal SaaS

Digital Garden have rebuilt and migrated NABERS's website and content, moving from its original end-of-life GovCMS Drupal 7 SaaS website to now use the latest GovCMS Drupal SaaS platform. The migrated site hosts all of NABERS's existing content and tools and features a new website theme that provides a refreshed look and feel.

Results


The new website has transformed the user experience by making information more accessible and easier to find, with a modern look and feel. Several GovCMS features and modules now make the sites content easier to search and filter for users.

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