Life Without Barriers breaks through content bottlenecks with Contentful

A person preparing to welcome their first foster child. A social worker exploring disability support services. A family researching home care options for an aging loved one. Every day, thousands of people like these turn to Life Without Barriers' website for trusted information, resources, and support.

As one of Australia's leading non-profits, Life Without Barriers provides disability services, child, youth, and family support, foster care, and community programs across the country. Its website plays a critical role in connecting a diverse range of audiences, from families to government agencies, with the information and services they need. But meeting these needs at scale is no small task. 

As the organization, its offerings, and its digital ecosystem grew, Life Without Barriers found that its monolithic CMS couldn’t deliver on more modern content management needs. A rigid CMS made it difficult to improve accessibility, performance, and SEO, while forcing marketers to rely on developers for even routine content updates.

In 2018, Life Without Barriers migrated to Contentful, laying the foundation for a more editor-friendly experience and a more digestible end-user experience.

Hurdling content management limitations by going headless

When it came to selecting a new platform, Life Without Barriers had two technical requirements: a platform that would separate content from presentation to support reuse and something that would play well with their preferred front-end framework, Gatsby. By separating content from presentation, the non-profit would be able to reuse content across its website and knowledge base, rather than rebuilding the same information over and over again, saving time and increasing the accuracy of information across its digital ecosystem.

“A headless CMS hit on everything we needed, and Contentful was really a standard in that space,” said Shea Kelly, Technical Lead at Life Without Barriers.

Before migrating their content, Life Without Barriers brought together a group of cross-functional stakeholders to strategize their new content model and ensure it was built to scale with the organization’s needs and content library for the foreseeable future. The resulting content model became the foundation for core webpages and their caregiver knowledge base.

With their content model fully in place, Life Without Barriers began migrating content to its new website. They took an incremental approach, migrating just a few areas of the website to validate the success of their model.

Freedom to publish – without the code

After the migration was complete, the Life Without Barriers Marketing team was able to hit the ground running, creating new content and pages without relying on support from developers as they had in the past.

“The heaviest users of Contentful are marketers,” Kelly pointed out. “They're in there publishing news articles, media releases, and caregiver information, and it's all kept very consistent thanks to the design system and content we initially set up.”

“And they genuinely enjoy using the platform,” added Kelly. “It's really straightforward to add content and make changes.”

Today, the team publishes and/or updates an average of 20 pieces of content a month, and it takes them just minutes. Being able to easily reuse content across different areas of the platform via references has contributed to this newfound agility as well.

Rather than recreating the same information across multiple pages, marketers can update content once and have those changes reflected wherever it is referenced. This not only speeds up publishing but also reduces the risk of outdated or inconsistent information appearing across the site.

Opening the door to accessibility

Marketers aren’t the only ones benefiting from Life Without Barriers’ new architecture; its clients are too. While the content is overall fresher, it is also far more accessible. 

“We test all our pages to ensure they’re Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) AA compliant. Contentful has made this simple as we can easily separate content from markup,” shared Kelly, highlighting the importance of catering to screen-readers.

Before Contentful, accessibility was barely on Life Without Barriers’ radar. Their old platform was difficult to work with, and content was closely tied to presentation. Now accessibility is a standard part of the content creation process, rather than an afterthought. The improvements have tangible benefits for the people Life Without Barriers serves. Whether clients are using screen readers, keyboard navigation, or other assistive technologies, they can access information more easily and independently.

Building towards even better experiences

While Life Without Barriers has already made plenty of improvements to the way they manage content, Kelly and the team are eager to take a closer look at Live Preview and the platform's A/B testing capabilities, and they have plenty of bandwidth to do so thanks to the time they spent initially planning the content modeling stage of migration.

“We haven’t been forced to do a whole lot of rework with core elements of our website, which is great,” he said, highlighting how good it feels to have finally hit the stage where things are “business as usual” in the best way possible.