Design study · Regional development district · Ohio
A resource desk, not a brochure
A redesign for a ten-county development district whose visitors are almost never browsing — they are a village clerk or a small business trying to find out whether any program will fund the thing in front of them.
Working redesign concept. Facts come from the association's public materials; this is not the official OMEGA District website.
- Council of governments website
- Funding Finder
- WordPress theme
- Loan comparison
- Report library
- WCAG 2.2 AA
OMEGA District — open the working site
Case study overview
The problem
A development district's value is knowing which of dozens of funding programs fits a given applicant. That knowledge usually lives in staff heads and gets published as a list of program names, which is useless to a village clerk who does not know the vocabulary. The report library has the same shape of problem: real substance, published as an undifferentiated wall of PDFs.
The approach
A Funding Finder does the matching a staff member would do, pointing villages, counties, nonprofits, and businesses toward likely programs based on who they are and what they need — turning institutional knowledge into a surface rather than a phone call. Business loan terms sit side by side so they can actually be compared, instead of one page per product. An answer-first Ask OMEGA handles the plain-language version of the same questions. The report library is searchable with direct PDF downloads, and staff, board, and county service coverage are published so a caller knows who they are looking for. The whole thing is composed as a civic resource desk in Lora and Noto Sans.
The result
Twelve routes on a real WordPress theme covering funding, loans, transportation planning, reports, and rosters, built to a WCAG 2.2 AA target from the district's public materials.
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