The Brief
Fairway Bayside Aged Care is a not-for-profit residential aged care community in Sandringham, Victoria. They came to me with a WordPress site they’d paid way too much for — perfectly serviceable on paper, but a nightmare to live with. No one on the team knew how to update anything on it, and the build had been locked down so tightly that even small changes meant going back to the original developer (and paying for it again).
The brief was three-fold: a redesign that actually reflected what Fairway offered, a closer alignment with their existing branding, and — most importantly — a site the team could update themselves once it was live.
Our Approach
The redesign itself was the easier part. I pulled the visual direction much closer to Fairway’s existing brand — calmer palette, more generous photography, content structured around the questions families bring with them rather than the org chart. The site now reads like an extension of the place itself, not a glossy brochure imposed over the top of it.
The harder, more important work was making the site genuinely owner-operated. I rebuilt it with editorial control as a first-class concern — clean editing blocks, sensible defaults, and a content structure the team could navigate without needing to think about templates, themes, or technical scaffolding. Adding a news post, swapping a photo, updating pricing or pushing a new role to careers — all things that happen multiple times a month at a place like Fairway — became one-click operations rather than a developer ticket.
To make the handover actually stick, I produced a custom library of video tutorials covering every page, block and editing pattern they’d realistically use. Real screen-recordings, plain-language voiceover, indexed by task — so a staff member can sit down, search for what they need to do, and get on with it. The library is theirs to keep. They can revisit it any time a new admin starts, and extend it as the site evolves.
The Outcome
Fairway now has a site that does what they originally hired a website to do — looks professional, communicates what they actually offer, supports families through a hard decision — with one critical difference: they can change it. Copy edits, photo swaps, news posts, job vacancies, pricing updates — all without picking up the phone or opening their wallet. The site has gone from a fixed asset they were stuck with to one they actually own.