cBD Program website

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In 2021, due to a machinery of government change, the Commercial Building Disclosure (CBD) Program was moved to the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources.

The website, cbd.gov.au, is a key resource for explaining energy rating disclosure obligations to building owners, landlords, real estate agents and tenants. It also provides access to a dedicated portal for CBD Accredited Assessors to submit ratings, and to access materials to gain accreditation to perform assessments under the program.  

The site had been forklifted ‘as is’ into a new content management system during which most of the structure of the website broke. Additionally the site housed duplicated, out of date and difficult to understand information. Accessibility was also a concern. 

The job 

Overleaf Communications was engaged to comprehensively review and rewrite all web content, provided as template MS Word documents for publishing later. 

The approach

I comprehensively reviewed all content on the CBD Program website, cbd.gov.au, and provided recommendations for redevelopment or archival activities for each page. 

To come to these recommendations, I: 

• considered the research and recommendations provided by a digital agency the client had engaged previously  
• reviewed archival snapshots of the website in trove.nla.gov.au to understand previous structures of the website  
• read relevant legislation and explanatory statements to understand how any legal requirements under the program extend to the website  
• reviewed NABERS.gov.au to understand the inter-connectivity between the 2 websites  
• confirmed and clarified my understanding of disclosure obligations with the CBD Program team. 

The output  

The previous digital agency engaged by the CBD Program had provided an audit and recommended IA based purely on samples of content, and readability scan data. 

I undertook an interrogative audit of every page, creating a more succinct and user-friendly IA than what they had proposed.  

In taking a more thorough approach, I:  

• identified out-of-date, conflicting and duplicated information
• could better emphathise with the pain points that the client's customers were experiencing
• developed a far more in-depth understanding of the subject matter, allowing for a rewrite that while in plain English, retained the nuance and legal requirements that the CBD Program was required to state. 

I developed consistent, accessible templates in MS Word and created all content in these documents for the CBD Program team to publish on the website at a time of their choosing. 

I also provided archival guidance for obsolete and superseded documents, and recommendations for their ‘guidance notes’ and factsheets which were out-of-scope for this project. 

The result 

I delivered: 

• a new IA with streamlined navigation, appropriate content groupings and intuitive labels
• 28 pages (down from 60) of accessible information written to an average reading level score of 7.79 (down from over 11 years.) 

The new content has yet to be published. The team opted to review their suite of factsheets and guidance notes in the context of the new and improved web content.

Overleaf Communications was again engaged to complete this work in 2022.