Hepatitis NSW

Hepatitis NSW helps everyone affected by viral hepatitis: the public, communities that mainstream health messaging often misses, and the clinicians, hospitals and schools who support them. For most of those people, the website is where they first meet the charity. It carries a lot of weight.

The Challenge

When we started, the site made that job harder than it should have been. Information was difficult to find. Accessibility fell short of what a health service needs. Years of audience research had been done, awaiting to be properly utilised & transformed.

What We Did

We rebuilt the site around how people actually look for help. The information architecture followed real search behaviour and the routes people take through a health question, so the About Us area, the navigation and a sprawl of contact forms became a small number of clear paths. We designed for the full range of people Hepatitis NSW serves, including culturally and linguistically diverse communities and Aboriginal communities, and we tested the concepts with the Hepatitis NSW managers group so the result reflected the people who use it.

Under the surface, we mapped every URL and set up redirects so the site kept its Google rankings through the move. We connected it to Healthdirect Australia, which feeds the charity’s resources into the national health directory. And we built in analytics and on-site search tracking from day one, so the team can see what people search for and where content is still missing.

Outcomes That Matter

• The NSW Chief Health Officer launched the new site at Parliament House, at a World Liver Day event for around 80 people from across the health sector.
• Monthly visitors grew roughly fourfold, from about 9,400 before launch to nearly 39,000, with a peak of almost 49,000 in a single month.
• Around 460,000 people now use the site each year. That is more than 700,000 since launch.
• Google shows the site about 63 million times a year and sends it over 430,000 visits. It ranks on the first page for all of its top search terms, and at or near number one in Australia for core hepatitis questions.
• The site does real work every day. Resource orders, service-directory look-ups, Infoline calls, speaker bookings and enquiries come in from the public, and from hospitals, schools and government departments around the country.

Together we’ve achieved a great outcome for the communities we serve, and we’ve significantly stepped up the accessibility and presentation of information. It’s been a pleasure to work on such a complex, multifaceted project, and the outcomes are well worth it

Maria McMahon COO, Hepatitis NSW

The Bottom Line

Good health information only helps the people who can find it. That is what changed here. The site now reaches the people who need it, in the moments they go looking, and it has become part of how Hepatitis NSW does its work.