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An ageing website, rebuilt as a civic platform.
Blackheath City Improvement District had a site built in an earlier era. It still worked, but it no longer reflected the organisation behind it — and members could not do the things they came to do.
Who is Blackheath CID?
A non-profit city improvement district in Blackheath, Cape Town, funded by and answerable to the property owners and businesses in its footprint. A CID lives on trust and responsiveness — residents report faults, members read notices, and stakeholders need documents. The website is where nearly all of that starts.
What was wrong with the old site?
Nothing dramatic, which is what made it easy to leave alone. It simply aged past what the organisation needed: harder to navigate, harder to act on, and reading as older than the work the CID actually does. This is what the audit surfaced.
An ageing first impression
The design and footer dated back well over a decade, so the site read as older than the organisation behind it.
A homepage without priority
Current notices and archive posts from years ago shared one long feed, so nothing looked more urgent than anything else.
Dense navigation
A large nested menu and a heavy sidebar made the important actions harder to find than they needed to be.
Key actions buried
Reporting a fault and joining as a member — the two things people most need — were not front and centre.
Limited search visibility
Without structured data or modern metadata, the site was harder for search engines to surface.
Built for desktop
The layout reflected desktop-era habits, in a market that now reads notices on a phone.
What actually changed?
What did the rebuild change?
The content barely changed. What changed was the order it appears in, and how quickly someone can act on it.
A search-led hero
Documents, notices and forms are what members come for, so finding them sits at the top rather than three levels down.
Report an issue in one tap
The single action the district most needs residents to take, moved out of a submenu and onto every screen.
A structured resource hub
Documents organised and dated, instead of scattered through a feed in the order they happened to be posted.
Built mobile-first
Rebuilt around how people actually read a notice, which is standing up, on a phone, in a hurry.
What does success look like here?
Not a conversion rate. A city improvement district is not trying to sell anyone anything — it is trying to look like an organisation that is on top of its work, and to let a member do the thing they came to do without hunting for it. Putting a percentage next to this would look better on our website and tell you nothing true about the project.
See it for yourself: bcid.co.za. The other case studies are on the case studies page, and the full list of what we have built is on our work.
What would the “before” say about your site?
Send us your web address and we'll go through the site and the SEO underneath it, then send back a written audit within 48 hours — the same look we take before starting any project like this one.