We partnered with DFPI to help protect consumers, foster financial innovation, and regulate industries that serve millions of Californians by delivering a new, modern, enterprise-level WordPress website.

Project Highlights

Screenshot of a consumer page from the new DFPI Website

Screenshots of the DFPI website on mobile devices

A New, Fresh, and Modern User Experience for Everyone

The introduction of the California Consumer Financial Protection Law (CCFPL) expanded the mission of the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (DFPI) to better protect consumers of financial services in the state. This change necessitated a complete reimagination of DFPI’s website to effectively serve the millions of Californians who use financial services daily, while also addressing the needs of industries regulated by the department, the legislature, and subject matter experts.

Through our award-winning collaborative approach, we worked with the DFPI team and external users to create a modern and engaging user experience that meets the needs of all visitors to the DFPI website. We conducted design sprints with DFPI’s decision-makers and held usability testing sessions with real users to validate and refine the prototypes we developed. We measured each step of the design process to ensure effective outcomes, including:

Optimizing content and access through a new information architecture and navigation system featuring clear labeling and organized content grouping.
Developing consumer-focused topic pages that consolidate all relevant content on subjects such as investing, debt management, cryptocurrency, and student loans.
Designing effective call-to-action mechanisms within the content to help users achieve their goals quickly and easily.
Designing a library of accessible, mobile-responsive web components and templates with a modern look and feel, promoting user engagement and ease of content access.
Creating a web style guide that lays the foundation for ongoing website enhancements and future applications in line with branding guidelines.

A New Unified Search Experience for the Website

We developed a new unified search experience that allows website visitors—whether they are consumers, industry experts, regulatory agencies, or members of the general public—to easily search for and find relevant content from a single search page. This unified search experience indexes and combines results from various data sources, including WordPress, external databases, and other DFPI enterprise applications, to provide accurate and relevant results. Additionally, this unified search experience enables website editors to dynamically display different types of content throughout the site, optimize search results, gain comprehensive insights into search analytics, and make real-time adjustments to improve search performance. We have implemented powerful features such as search promotions, AI-powered search suggestions, synonyms, and customizable display fields and filters.

Screenshot of a unified search results page

Large Scale Data Migration

Web Pages Migrated

Data Records Indexed

Media Assets Migrated

Due to the historical regulatory nature of the Department and its expanded mission to protect consumers, the project involved migrating over 14,000 pages of content and indexing more than 500,000 data records to be accessible via the new website. Our team developed code and strategies that streamlined the migration of over 14,000 pages, more than 10 GB of documents, and numerous media images, as well as the indexing of over 500,000 data records. This approach significantly reduced the time required for content migration and improved access to relevant information. Additionally, we collaborated closely with the DFPI project team to enhance the content on the new website. This included categorizing information, adding images, optimizing labels and text, creating essential landing pages, and defining a new content governance strategy for the redesigned website.

An Enterprise-Level WordPress Implementation.

The new website needed a robust enterprise WordPress environment capable of managing large volumes of content and traffic while maintaining optimal performance. Additionally, it was essential to develop integrations that would allow the website to display information from various sources, including the content management system, third-party databases, and external business applications like DocqNet. This would be achieved through the development and use of Web APIs, custom code, and effective hosting. We combined the simplicity of the WordPress ecosystem with a robust system architecture, carefully selected plugins, integrations with external systems, and secure content authoring controls to create a truly enterprise-level WordPress solution that offers outstanding security and performance. Key features implemented for the new DFPI website include:

Dynamic web modules that display content based on specific topics, content types, and other metadata as specified by content editors.
Custom content types to enhance content findability through search and dynamic Divi modules.
Dynamically generated pages that pull content from external data sources.
Customizable content publishing workflows and access controls.
A powerful search engine that integrates various data sources, providing robust functionality for both users and administrators.

Screenshot of the DIVI content editor in the new DFPI website

Showcase of the DFPI website in different devices