Case Study

Pacific Centre Family Services Association (PCFSA) is a non-profit organization that has been supporting residents of Southern Vancouver Island with counselling, medical, and social services for almost 60 years. PCFSA focuses on providing services that facilitate equitable access to physical, emotional, and culturally appropriate healthcare and counselling.

PCFSA recently approached Caorda to design a new website. The main reason for a fresh site was PCFSA’s expansion of their services to include primary care, as they had traditionally offered counselling only. This service expansion meant their target audience would also grow, and the website would need to lead visitors to the information they need.

The audiences for different services are unique, so PCFSA needed to clearly direct each group to various areas of the site. With a new website, their goal was to minimize phone calls to their office by ensuring online information was quick and easy to access.

A fresh look

PCFSA’s Centre for Wellbeing in Colwood had recently undergone a beautiful renovation, expanding their building to accommodate additional primary care services in a larger space. To go along with the expansion, it was decided the traditional logo should receive an update to compliment the award-winning exterior of their new building.

Caorda worked with PCFSA to modernize their logo, using a more modern palette with a gradient effect to compliment the calming and welcoming feeling of their new building.

Caorda also used new imagery of the building throughout the website to help showcase the stunning architecture. In addition to promoting PCFSA’s expanded services and new building, showcasing images of the facility throughout the website was a strategy used to help prepare visitors for their appointments, with the idea being it would help create a sense of familiarity and trust before visitors set foot in the centre.

User experience

PCFSA serves children, youth, and adults from a diverse range of abilities and backgrounds with a particular focus on underserved populations. As such, PCFSA wanted to be sure that the website’s design would be accessible to all and reflect the diversity of the community they serve. On top of that, the site needed to help people easily find information on counselling or primary care services.

The Caorda team created a design that focuses attention on the separate areas of the site for counselling services and primary care, using a collapsible alert bar and pop-up to direct traffic to different sections of the site. Once collapsed, the bar still shows enough information to quickly locate service pages without taking up too much real estate on the page.

In addition, since PCFSA serves such a broad audience, special landing pages were created to easily direct users to their desired service using colourful page tiles and clear titles.

Editing and updating content

At Caorda, we believe your website should be a tool that can be easily used by not only your website visitors, but your own team. In order to make regular updates, PCFSA required a website that was easy for staff to use, post careers or news updates, or add/remove services depending on availability. Caorda designed the back end of the website with the PCFSA team in mind, making sure that every element would be intuitive and easy to update.

The staff at PCFSA also relied on the website to help with fundraising. To assist with that important function, an embedded online donation form was added to the site to ensure making donations is simple for anyone – without having to navigate away from the website.