Mortgage Stress Victoria
Complete digital launch for a Victorian Government-funded service, featuring a lightning-fast WordPress site on AWS, custom OpenSearch, and interactive resource hub.
Client
Mortgage Stress Victoria
Industry
Non-profit / Legal & Financial Counselling
Year
2023
Technologies
About the Project
Mortgage Stress Victoria (MSV) is the state's only free specialist service dedicated to keeping homeowners out of foreclosure. I led the green-field build: architecting a headless-friendly WordPress solution running on AWS Elastic Beanstalk, crafting a bespoke block-based theme with Advanced Custom Fields, and wiring a custom OpenSearch endpoint that delivers instant, faceted search across fact sheets, submissions, and vacancies. Issuu is embedded for flip-book publications, while Mailchimp automations capture supporters and funnel them into segmented journeys. The end result is a resilient, WCAG-AA site that empowers both the public and MSV's small comms team.
Key Features
Custom block theme & global style system for non-technical editors
OpenSearch-powered instant search with filters (topic, year, content type)
Dynamic fact-sheet & submission library rendered as Issuu flipbooks or PDFs
Multi-step 'Advice + Rights' intake form with conditional logic
Vacancy board & application workflow managed via ACF
Mailchimp newsletter capture with automated onboarding journey
Headless-ready JSON endpoints for future mobile app
WCAG-AA compliance, performance optimisation & nightly S3 backups
Results
Page loads < 1 s from anywhere in Victoria (Cloudflare + EB stack)
Search latency < 200 ms across 250+ documents
Client reports 75 % drop in manual upload time versus previous Squarespace
Email list grew 4× in first 6 months thanks to seamless Mailchimp funnel
Recognised by Victorian Gov funding body as 'digital best practice' example
Website supports > 20 k unique visitors a month with zero downtime