The South Dakota Department of Health partnered with Blend and Umbraco to create a future-focused, relevant, and flexible website to promote healthy living across the state.
If you ran a health-focused website in 2020 — especially as a government entity — saying you had a spike in traffic is an understatement. With increased traffic looking for information about COVID-19, to the ongoing rollout of vaccinations and guidelines, every state Department of Health was under a major crunch, seeing their sites tested to the absolute max.
It’s with these lessons in mind that, once the dust settled a bit, the South Dakota Department of Health began a major overhaul of its existing site. Blend Interactive was selected to partner with the state to help them reach their website goals.
At the most basic level, the new Department of Health site needed to streamline communication and editorial workflow. Moving from a largely static site to a site built upon the Umbraco content management solution opened up a realm of possibilities, from reporting and content assignments to an improved and easy-to-understand editorial interface.
Beyond this was the sheer amount of documentation and reporting necessary to keep a government entity running smoothly in the online space. Blend helped develop an architecture that allows the South Dakota Department of Health to easily manage both giant pools of content, like data reports and dashboards, as well as create custom landing pages through the use of design-focused blocks.
This combination of deeply structured content and free-form design elements helps ensure the site isn’t just built for now but that it is built for growth.
