Website redesign and re-platform

As part of The Salvation Army network, the Salvation Army Employment Plus (TSAEP) changes lives and communities through the power of employment.

The TSAEP needed a new website to better serve their primary two audiences–job seekers and employers–and needed a strategic approach to user experience, visual design and content to better serve these two groups. As one of the largest government-funded employment service providers in Australia, the TSAEP website also had to meet strict compliance requirements.

Tundra was engaged by TSAEP to visually refresh their website, and re-platform onto Craft CMS for ease of ongoing content management, and allow for better connection between employers and job seekers across Australia.

The Salvation Army Employment Plus knew from user research that job seekers were finding simple tasks like making or changing an appointment difficult to perform online. This was especially frustrating to job seekers, as missed appointments impact their unemployment benefits.

Analytics showed that there was also confusion around which content was relevant for job seekers and which was aimed at employers. Visitors would quickly become lost on the site, which led them to enter information into any online form they could find. This was putting additional strain on the internal teams trying to triage and facilitate these enquiries.

We worked with TSEAP to create a content strategy based on known user needs, providing clearer pathways and information hierarchy, to reduce confusion among visitors.

To achieve this, we began by understanding the key audiences visiting the TSEAP website—job seekers and employers—defining their needs and goals, and mapping common user journeys for each audience. We considered each group's main goals and pain points, based on insights gleaned through analytics and what we learned about each audience from TSAEP’s research and first-hand experience with clients.

Key user goals we identified were (1) Booking or changing appointments; (2) Viewing job listings; (3) Finding a TSAEP office.

From there, we reviewed the site’s structure, basing any changes to the information architecture on website analytics and existing research, to create more intuitive, seamless user flows.

Once the new site structure was finalised, we crafted user-centred content to support on-page navigation and comprehension, focusing on clear content hierarchy and structure to help users scanning pages to quickly find relevant information.

By presenting users with the right content at the right moment in the user journey, we were able to optimise their overall experience of TSAEP.

Alongside a new content strategy and optimised site structure, we also gave the site a UI uplift, rolling out new components, and designing and building a custom job vacancy upload tool and a map function.

Design system

As part of the UI design process, we established a full digital design system for TSEAP in Figma. It incorporated their above-the-line style guides, iconography and typography, and refined the elements they were already successfully utilising across non-digital brand touchpoints. The design system was set up to facilitate a component-based approach for the new website design and replatform. This resulted in a full, functional component library to not only serve the needs of this website, but provide consistency and speed-to-market through TSAEP’s digital ecosystem with little effort.

Job vacancy tool

The new website needed to display job vacancies by job type and region so that users could easily identify jobs that they were eligible to apply for. The internal TSAEP job board was contained within a system with no available API to directly extract the data to then display on the website, so we created a custom upload tool in the new CMS where TSAEP teams could upload job data using a csv file.

The custom tool mapped csv data to suburbs and postcodes to assist users with their search, and automatically consolidated similar roles and translated very technical job roles into more natural language.

Custom office locator

Given that a primary purpose of the website was for users to book an appointment, we needed a way for job seekers to easily search for a TSAEP office, assess their eligibility and make contact.

To facilitate this, we created a custom map with office data that can be filtered by service type, postcode or suburb, and location pins that can expand to display all relevant contact information.

Componentised Development

The front-end team used Craft CMS to develop the previously identified components from the design system, which were then applied to define various page templates. By creating these templates within the CMS, we provided a clear structure for how the components should be used, while also giving TSAEP's content editors the flexibility to tailor each page as needed.

The completed components formed a bespoke component library for TSAEP, transforming the design system into a fully functional, interactive toolkit. This allowed the creation of modular page templates, with page content generated dynamically based on the components selected in the CMS.

This modular approach ensures that future TSAEP projects can be built using the same component library, delivering consistency and efficiency across individual pages and entire websites within TSAEP's digital framework. At the same time, it offers ultimate flexibility by using variations of each component. For instance, the custom office locator was not only a full-featured component for the locator template, but also had a simplified variation, allowing it to be used in other templates, such as a feature on the homepage.

The new website utilises a componentised approach for flexible ongoing updates that maintain design consistency and require no development intervention.

Given that the team at TSAEP who manage the website are often stretched across multiple departments with competing priorities, we ensured this project provided them with an easy-to-manage CMS solution that is both robust and cost-effective, to serve them not only at launch, but well into the future.

The refreshed content strategy and clearer user pathways also offers visitors to the website a more intuitive, efficient and satisfying user experience, where they can easily achieve their goals.