Category
Nonprofit / Public Health & Human Services — Regional Center serving individuals with developmental disabilities and their families
Services
Information Architecture & Sitemap
Website Design
Wordpress Development
Wireframes
UX/UI Design
Accessibility
SEO + AI Visibility
Challenge
SDRC’s website is a critical resource hub — serving families navigating the disability services system, providers, job seekers, and the public, often at stressful moments — but it had outgrown its own structure and needed to meet a high bar for accessibility given the population it serves.
Result
The Bureau of Small Projects turned a sprawling, regulation-heavy public resource into a navigable, audience-first experience — easier for families in crisis to find the right service, easier for providers to locate resources, and built on an accessible, reusable foundation SDRC can keep evolving.
Your Journey Begins With Us
The San Diego Regional Center (SDRC) serves as an essential link connecting individuals with developmental and intellectual disabilities and their families to community partners for services and support.
SDRC’s website isn’t just a marketing site, it’s a critical resource that families lean on, often at some of the most stressful and consequential moments in their lives. It also has to work for service providers managing billing and compliance, job seekers, media, and the general public, all at once. Over time, the site had grown into a large, complex information ecosystem: service categories organized by age group (infants, school-age, transition-age, adults), several very different audience types, multilingual content requirements, and dense regulatory and transparency documentation.
That complexity had outpaced the site’s structure, making it genuinely hard for people to find what actually applied to them. Given the population SDRC serves, the site also needed to meet a high bar for accessibility, and it needed a foundation that would hold up for both traditional search and the newer reality of AI-driven discovery, where content has to be structured clearly enough for answer engines — not just search crawlers — to understand and surface it accurately.
We led the redesign end to end, starting with information architecture and a new sitemap, then moving into wireframes, homepage and interior page design (About, Clients & Families, Service Providers), full UX/UI, accessibility work, and SEO and AI visibility.
Rather than mirror how SDRC is organized internally, we rebuilt the site’s structure around how people actually search for help — by life stage and by audience — which cut down the number of clicks between “I need help” and “here’s what applies to you.” Because clients and families, service providers, job seekers, and community partners all come to the site with different goals, we designed distinct entry points and landing experiences for each, rather than forcing everyone through one generic navigation path. Accessibility wasn’t treated as a compliance checkbox added at the end — it shaped layout, contrast, navigation, and content hierarchy from the earliest design decisions, working toward WCAG 2.1 AA conformance. With dozens of interior pages spanning service categories, resources, and provider information, we also built a reusable design system so new pages stay visually and structurally consistent as SDRC’s content continues to grow. And beyond standard on-page SEO, we structured the content — clear headings, well-scoped pages, consistent hierarchy — to be legible not just to search crawlers but to AI-driven answer engines as well.
The result was a redesigned site that turns a sprawling, regulation-heavy public resource into something genuinely navigable. Families in crisis can find the right service faster, providers can locate operational resources without digging, and SDRC now has an accessible, reusable digital foundation it can keep building on rather than one it will need to overhaul again.
Simplifying a large, complex information ecosystem
SDRC’s content footprint is large: eligibility rules, age-based service pathways, provider resources, transparency documentation, and multilingual versions of nearly all of it. None of that content is unreasonable on its own; the problem was how it had been organized. Like a lot of long-running institutional sites, the structure had grown to mirror the organization itself, with departments and programs each adding their own section over time which is a natural way for a site to evolve, but not how the people using it actually think. A parent whose child was just diagnosed doesn’t think in terms of “Early Start Program” — they think “my toddler needs help, what do I do.”
So instead of preserving the internal structure, we rebuilt the architecture around what actually predicts what someone needs: their life stage and their audience type. A parent of an infant, a family with a school-age child, a young adult transitioning out of the system, a service provider, or someone in the community. Organizing around that let us route each group toward the pathway that applies to them almost immediately, rather than making them dig through generic categories to figure out where they fit. The result is a much shorter distance between landing on the site in a moment of need and actually finding the answer — fewer clicks, less guessing, less chance someone gives up partway through.
Making accessibility part of the experience up front
Given who SDRC serves — individuals with developmental and intellectual disabilities, along with their families — accessibility couldn’t be an afterthought bolted on right before launch. It had to shape the work from the start. So layout, contrast, navigation patterns, and content hierarchy were all decided with accessibility in mind from the earliest design conversations, not adjusted after the fact to pass a checklist, working toward WCAG 2.1 AA conformance throughout.
That meant thinking about things like how predictable and consistent navigation feels for someone who relies on routine, how legible text and color contrast are for users with visual or cognitive differences, and how clearly information is structured so it’s easy to follow regardless of how someone is reading or navigating the page. Building it in from the beginning, rather than retrofitting it, meant accessibility could actually inform the design rather than constrain it after the fact.
Designing around multiple audiences and user needs
Clients & families, service providers, job seekers, and community partners all come to the site with different goals. Rather than forcing one navigation path to serve everyone, we designed distinct entry points and landing experiences — the Clients & Families and Service Providers sections in particular — so each audience lands somewhere built for them.
With dozens of interior pages across service categories, resources, and provider information, we built a consistent component and layout system so new pages stay visually and structurally coherent as SDRC’s content continues to grow.
Beyond traditional on-page SEO, the new structure and content hierarchy were built to be legible to AI-driven answer engines — clear headings, well-scoped pages, and structured information that’s easier for both search crawlers and AI tools to parse and surface accurately.
