Built for everyday use & future growth, the new website for Vermont SC combines thoughtful design with intuitive functionality, making it easier than ever for the community to stay informed, connected and engaged.
Vermont Secondary College (VSC), a large public secondary school in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, partnered with us to completely rebuild their outdated website. Serving a broad community of Years 7–12 students and families, the school needed a modern, intuitive, and future-ready platform that aligned with their brand and met the Department of Education’s expectations. We delivered a full-service solution encompassing UX strategy and information architecture, UI design, custom WordPress development, content migration and redirects, performance and security hardening, and staff training with a tailored admin handbook. The project launched in November 2024, moving VSC to a cloud-hosted environment and empowering staff with a secure, easy-to-manage site that reflects the quality and professionalism of the College.
VSC’s existing website was severely dated (2000s/early 2010s), hard—or in places impossible—to update, and ran on an on-premises server that posed stability and security risks. Visitors struggled to find information due to poor IA, scattered content, and frequent 404s. The school lacked a dedicated marketing team, so the new site had to be extremely easy for office staff to manage day-to-day.  
Project objectives were clear: deliver a professional, modern site that’s intuitive on the front end, effortless on the back end, and hosted in the cloud to improve security, uptime, and performance. 
Sector-specific constraints: comply with Department of Education communications expectations (clarity, inclusive language), tighten security, and ensure content is easily discoverable—even for international families navigating the site.
We rebuilt from the ground up. After discovery, we prioritised content needs, planned a rational sitemap, and wireframed key pathways to make finding information fast and predictable. Visual design then aligned tightly to VSC’s brand guidelines to keep the experience modern, clean, and highly legible. 
We focused on frictionless navigation and wayfinding: a full-screen navigation for distraction-free orientation, site-wide search for immediacy, image headers to introduce section context, and breadcrumbs to make the hierarchy unmistakable. We also embedded WCAG-led typographic and colour decisions to maximise legibility for all users.  
We developed a custom WordPress build using modular sections and templates to keep content creation flexible. To empower non-technical staff, we integrated a drag-and-drop page builder (WPBakery) and implemented tailored user permissions so content editors can’t inadvertently access or break global settings.  
We audited legacy URLs and authored hundreds of redirects to preserve equity and eliminate dead ends. We enabled 2-Factor Authentication (2FA), hardened security, and tuned performance via compression, caching, and a CDN—then laid robust SEO foundations to set the new site up for growth. Finally, we moved hosting to the cloud to retire on-premises risk.   
Beyond in-person training, we delivered a step-by-step admin handbook so staff have an always-on reference for publishing updates, uploading documents, and maintaining pages with confidence.
VSC placed deep trust in our expertise. We led the strategy and solution design, with the College providing feedback and ideas for us to develop. Even through staff changes on the client side, we onboarded new stakeholders seamlessly and kept momentum without losing context.
This project demonstrates how rigorous IA, accessibility-first design, and developer-friendly architecture combine to solve complex, real-world constraints common in education—security, clarity, and maintainability—without sacrificing brand expression. It also underscores the scalability of our WordPress approach for large, content-heavy organisations.  
The system is designed to last: easy to adapt with new content and sections, with automated optimisation running in the background. VSC occasionally returns for complex enhancements, but thanks to training resources, most updates are handled confidently in-house.
Explore the new site for Vermont Secondary College at: https://www.vermontsc.vic.edu.au
