Background
Tresillian is Australia's largest not-for-profit child and family health organisation, supporting new parents through some of the hardest weeks of their lives. Their website, built on an ageing version of Umbraco CMS, had outgrown both the platform version it sat on and the support available to maintain it — the incumbent agency had reached the limit of what it could help with and referred Tresillian to Webcoda.
The practical problems compounded quickly. Content was awkward to edit, so it aged. Tresillian runs centres across the country, but there was no reliable way for a parent to find the closest one. And the audience made every usability shortcoming costly: people arriving on the site are often sleep-deprived, distracted and looking for one specific answer at 3am. A site that asked them to work for it was a site that failed them.
Solution
Tresillian were understandably wary of Umbraco — their experience of it was the old version's editing interface. We made the case for the current release: genuinely usable for editors, and flexible enough to carry events, e-commerce and complex service content on one platform rather than three.
We began with discovery and UX workshops, designing for a parent who is groggy, one-handed and easily interrupted. That shaped everything: fewer decisions per screen, plainer language, shorter paths to the thing being looked for.
The centre finder was the standout build. Tresillian's centres are spread across Australia, so we integrated Google Maps and added geolocation to surface a user's nearest centre without them typing anything. Umbraco Forms handles enquiry and registration flows; Umbraco Commerce covers paid offerings. The editing experience was rebuilt around how Tresillian's team actually works, so content stays current.
Impact
The new site does the job it was built for. Parents can find their nearest centre in a couple of taps instead of scrolling a list of suburbs, and the advice and support content is structured so the answer arrives before attention runs out. Feedback from users has been consistently positive, and Tresillian's staff — the people who were sceptical about Umbraco at the start — are now advocates for it.
The organisational impact went further than the site. Following launch, media outlets began approaching Tresillian for comment and information, using the site as the front door. Internally, the team publishes independently rather than queuing changes with an agency, which means service information, centre details and events stay accurate. For a not-for-profit, that shift from paying for maintenance to spending on outreach is the result that matters.
