STaR
A special education charity serving families, educators and NDIS participants needed one website that worked for all three. We rebuilt STaR's site on WordPress with an audience-first structure and an explicit accessibility focus.
Rebuilt STaR's WordPress site around its audiences (families, professionals, and the wider education community) so each group reaches the right programme without detours.
What we were solving
STaR (Specialist Teaching and Research) is a New South Wales charity established in 2001 by Dr Coral Kemp and a group of parents and professionals from Macquarie University's Special Education Centre. Its mission is making quality special education accessible. That work now spans early years programmes, school-age support, post-school services, NDIS-registered supports, peer support groups like MyTime, and professional development for early childhood educators.
The breadth is the problem. A parent looking for the Early Years Program, an educator after Key Word Sign training, and an NDIS participant planning post-school options all arrive at the same homepage with different questions. Serve one audience well and you bury the other two. And because STaR's whole purpose is accessibility, the site had to hold to that standard in practice.
Success meant a structure where each visitor picks a path in one click, content the STaR team publishes themselves, and a site on STaR's own hosting rather than tied to an agency.
How we tackled it
Structure by audience, not by org chart
Charity websites often mirror the organisation's internal structure, so visitors need to understand the org chart before they can find help. We went the other way. The site is organised around who you are (For Families, For Professionals) and what you need (Services, Courses, Research, News), with programme pages such as the Early Years Program, Triple P Parenting Workshops and Support for ECEC Services one click below. Some content belongs to more than one audience, so categorisation and cross-linking do the work. We handled that in the content model rather than by copying pages, keeping one source of truth for each programme.
Integrate, don't rebuild
Online courses link out to STaR's existing Thinkific platform. Recreating that inside WordPress would have added cost and a second system to maintain, so the build stayed focused on what WordPress does well: structured content, publishing and forms. The same thinking applied to hosting. The site was migrated onto STaR's own server before going live in 2025. STaR owns and hosts its site, and nothing is locked to us.
A handover the team can live with
Working with STaR's staff and their brand partners at Banter Group, we set up team profiles with blurbs capped at 30 words so the layout holds, contact forms that route enquiries to the right person, and a blog with author attribution so news and research updates carry a byline. A final round of client review changes and pre-launch QA closed the build.
What we delivered
STaR now has a site where a parent, an educator and an NDIS participant each get a direct route to the right programme. The team publishes its own news, team profiles and programme updates without a developer in the loop. The structure also gives STaR's research and professional learning work, a side of the organisation general visitors rarely saw, a proper home alongside family services. Courses still run on Thinkific, one click away.
What we learned
Mixed-audience sites fail politely. Nobody complains; the wrong visitors just leave. The fix is rarely more content. It is an architecture that asks "who are you?" before it asks anything else, then keeps every programme page one click from that answer.
The other lesson is handover discipline. A 30-word cap on profile blurbs feels fussy during a build, but it keeps a template tidy two years later when someone who never met the design team adds a staff member. Small guardrails in the content model cost little and hold the design together.
Impact & outcomes
Google Search impressions and 1,830 clicks in 16 months
