Speech & Language Development Australia (& The Glenleighden School)
Speech & Language Development Australia (SALDA) is the nation’s peak body supporting and advocating for the needs of children and young people with speech, language and related disorders.
Since 1976, Speech & Language Development Australia (SALDA) have committed to supporting all children and young people to find their voice.
Find your voice
Testimonial:
Min is the ultimate professional and expert in her field. We really wanted to push the envelope for our new website delivering a superior customer experience with varied online needs for our service areas including ecommerce, online learning and event registration to name a few. There was never a point where Min was unable to provide a way to achieve our online goals. Responsive at all times, Min worked tirelessly with us to overcome tight deadlines and our limited online experience. As a result we are seeing increased online traffic, higher conversion to our services and subscriptions to our online newsletter. Due to the success of our first collaboration we then engaged Min on another project for the international disability market with outstanding results. Speech & Language Development Australia highly recommend the services offered by Min Dean. Working with Min provides a truly collaborative experience. She is committed to providing exceptional customer service and outcomes for her clients and can be trusted to see a project through to the end delivering outstanding results.
-- Natalie TurnerMarketing & Fundraising at Speech & Language Development Australia
Web project details:
Speech & Language Development Australia is now Language Disorder Australia; read the new case study here.
Speech & Language Development Australia (SALDA) contacted me to work on getting their website, which they were finding difficult to work with, redeveloped so that it could be more useful and manageable to both users and editors alike.
They already had a very awesome logo, but wanted their website to take full advantage of the wonderful photos they had of their office and school. Their school (The Glenleighden School) was a seperate website and they wanted to tie the two more closely together; ideally, to be part of the one WordPress installation with the domains mapped to the relevant section.
The school aside; each department within SALDA had different requirements; Support services needed to be able to accept referrals and download all submissions of a complex form to Excel. Fundraising needed a simple, functional way to create events and campaigns, including online donation collections, Professional learning required an learning management system through which users could sign up to a variety of membership levels (including paid membership), complete their online learning modules and be issued with a certificate at the end of the course, and the Research section needed to be able to upload publications.
This is possibly the largest website build I have ever taken on, taking the largest amount of time to develop and the most customisation I’ve ever had to create, and the results have made everyone – myself, the clients, and the public – ridiculously happy. The design was, by contrast, completed swiftly; the excellent logo plus the photos provided instant inspiration and the final approved design didn’t deviate far from the first draft I submitted. It was the kind of website that hit all the nails on their heads first try. We decided that each department of the organisation would adopt a different ‘colour’, which would be used for headings and accent elements, so that while each section was still undeniably part of the over-arching organisation, all pages within each department would have their own specific colour scheme.
Development wise, I’ve coupled WordPress with LifterLMS, Event Espresso, Ninja Forms and a host of addons to each to form a cohesive, content-rich, highly functional website. The Online Learning Modules section is still being developed in-house, but the functionality is ready to go.
For the Glenleighden School website; it exists entirely within the SALDA site, to make updating either website easier and giving it access to the functionality available on the main org’s website, such as publication and team member pickers. School news is simply a category within the main news section. The same theme is used; there is simply an additional set of styles, plus alternative menus, sidebars and theme options requested whenever a glenleighden.org.au url is requested, to make the school website stand in its own right.
Paypal and Stripe are integrated for the learning module payments, form submissions (e.g, for fast donation payments), and for event ticket purchasing.
A publications section was created (custom post type), built with custom fields that allow the content editor to upload the file and mark it as a member-only publication. The publication can display an image, summary text and indicates the files size.
This is a website that continues to evolve out like a tree sprouting new, delightful shoots, and I look forward to keep working with Natalie and Shaun at SALDA to not only refine, improve and add new sections to this wonderful organisation’s website, but to work on many new projects with them in the future.
Since SALDA and the Glenleighden School websites have gone live, I have also worked with them on the RADLD.org campaign; a website that we needed to get live fast. The SALDA theme was used, the branding was updated, a few minor adjustments were made to suit the desired look and feel, and I added a custom quiz section, plus online calculator. RADLD took about a day of coding to put together, and the result really was fabulous!