UpSkilled – bringing order to a site built to grow
A business that had outgrown its website
UpSkilled built its reputation on accredited qualifications for individuals. But the business had evolved: a new short course offering was targeting corporate clients and the site wasn’t set up to speak to both audiences. The trigger for the project was a tech stack that was no longer supported – but the real opportunity was bigger than a platform migration.
Multiple visual styles, inconsistent patterns and no clear hierarchy across pages were undermining trust and costing conversions. The sales team was chasing unqualified leads and incorrect contact details. The marketing team had no sensible way to maintain what was there.
Deliverables
Stakeholder and user interviews
Stakeholder engagement
Workshop facilitation
Visual design
SharePoint development
Training documentation
Governance documentation
Process
Two sessions to define what success looked like
Over a couple of working sessions with the marketing manager we pushed beyond the immediate technical problem and aligned on what the site actually needed to do. The business goals pulled in two directions at once: retain the B2C audience that had built the brand while attracting corporate clients for the growing B2B offering.
- Position UpSkilled as experts in short courses for corporates as well as qualifications for individuals
- Improve the user experience across the whole site, not just the landing pages
- Maintain the existing SEO advantage
- Reduce unqualified leads and incorrect contact details reaching the sales team
- A maintenance approach the marketing team could realistically sustain
Process
Name the problems before solving them
With a clearer picture of what the business needed, a full site audit and heuristic review came next. It gave stakeholders something concrete to react to and shifted early conversations away from subjective opinions about aesthetics toward specific documented issues with structure and usability.
The audit reframed the brief again. What looked like a visual inconsistency problem was also a structural one: users couldn’t orient themselves or understand what to do next. Findability was broken well before the course detail pages.
The review also helped identify what to retire: content that was hard to maintain and didn’t connect through to the rest of the site was adding noise without adding value.
Design approach
Structure before style
I don’t always start with wireframes, but on a site this size, jumping straight to layout decisions without a shared understanding of what’s broken is a fast way to solve the wrong problems.
For an RTO competing in a crowded market, organic search is the primary acquisition channel. UpSkilled had invested years building content that ranked. The chat box and downloadable guide forms were converting. None of that could be disturbed — the challenge wasn’t what to cut, it was how to design a system that made the volume feel coherent rather than sprawling.
That constraint shaped the wireframes directly. Rather than designing individual pages the focus went on repeatable structures: course listings, qualification detail pages, category hubs and marketing landing pages. Templates had to handle long-form content gracefully, navigation had to scale across B2B and B2C.
Design approach
Reusable everything
With a site of this scale there was no viable path that relied on bespoke page design. The solution was a modular system: a library of reusable components that could be assembled into any page type without producing visual chaos.
A consistent icon system gave the interface a shared visual language across disparate content types. Better filtering gave users a way into the course catalogue without needing to know exactly what they were looking for upfront. Marketing pages got defined templates that gave the team guardrails without removing flexibility. UpSkilled’s point of difference and personal approach finally had room to show up consistently.
Designing for the team maintaining the site matters as much as designing for the person using it. Reusable modules meant future pages could be built without revisiting design decisions from scratch.
Design approach
Experience over testing
Eight weeks is a tight window for a site this large. There was no room for formal user testing rounds in the schedule and no organisational backing to add it. Instead I leaned on experience: pattern recognition from past projects, established heuristics and a sharp eye on where similar sites typically lose people.
Testing would have added confidence to specific decisions. What experience provided was speed and directional clarity without getting stuck in process for its own sake.
Design approach
Leaving the team with tools, not just a website
A redesign only holds if the team can maintain it consistently over time. Alongside the site itself I created a custom icon set to give the interface a shared visual language across disparate content types, and a visual style guide to document the decisions behind it.
The style guide gave the marketing team a reference point for anything built after handover: new pages, campaign assets and future updates could stay on-brand without needing a designer in the room.
Outcome
Delivered in 8 weeks. Tight but clean.
The redesign landed on time. A site that had accumulated years of inconsistency came out the other side with a unified visual language, a scalable template system and clear patterns for the team to build from.
The SEO-critical content stayed intact. The structure around it finally matched the quality of what UpSkilled was offering.
Just wanted to thank you for your help and work. Everyone loves the new site and its simplicity.
Head of Marketing, UpSkilled
