Background
When COVID-19 hit in 2020, every state Department of Health found out quickly whether their website could hold up. For South Dakota, the stress test revealed what the team already suspected: the existing site was static, hard to update, poorly organized, and not built for the kind of rapid communication a public health emergency demands. Navigation was confusing, search was unreliable, and editorial staff had little control over how content was structured or published.
Once things stabilized, the South Dakota Department of Health set out to fix it properly. That meant replacing an aging CMS with something modern, flexible, and built around how people actually use a health department website — not just how the department was internally organized. Blend was selected as the partner to make it happen.
Solution
Blend started with a thorough discovery process: a full site crawl of nearly 7,800 URLs, stakeholder interviews, three focus groups with general public and medical users, and a competitive review of eight other state health department websites. That research shaped everything that followed — from the content model to the navigation structure to the decision to organize the site around topics rather than internal departments.
The new site was built on Umbraco, giving the communications team a CMS they could actually use. Block-based page templates let editors build flexible landing pages without developer help, while deeply structured content types handled the department's large pools of data — disease listings, dashboards, reports, grants, and news — with automatic cross-promotion based on taxonomy. A synonym-powered A-Z listing lets editors control how content surfaced in search without touching code. Forms previously locked in PDFs were moved to HTML. And a custom design system established a consistent visual language across every program, department, and audience the site serves — grounded in WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards from the start.
Impact
The result is a site that can flexible with the department's needs — in normal times and in moments of crisis.
"They took our huge website and made it manageable by building an easy-to-use CMS with everything we need to succeed. Thanks to Blend, keeping the Department of Health website up to date has gotten much easier, and the site itself looks and functions amazingly."
"Blend was vested into our success from the beginning. They value cutting-edge and customer-friendly technology while ensuring reliability and responsiveness. We would definitely partner with them again."
Results
