The Scottish Funding Council

Building a Future-Proof WordPress Platform for Transparency, Access, and Strategic Impact

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Background

The Scottish Funding Council (SFC) is the national authority for funding tertiary education and research in Scotland. As a central point of engagement with universities, colleges, government, and the public, the SFC website plays a critical role in supporting transparency, publishing policy and statistical data, and enabling stakeholder collaboration.

Facing the end-of-life of their legacy CMS and an increasing need for digital agility, SFC embarked on a full redesign and rebuild of their website. The goal: create an accessible, scalable platform that reflects SFC’s strategic importance in Scotland’s education and research ecosystem, while empowering internal teams to publish, manage and evolve content independently. 6B was appointed to lead the project.

The Need

SFC’s legacy CMS (Activedition) was outdated, rigid, and nearing end-of-life — creating immediate technical and editorial risk. The existing platform offered limited search functionality, inflexible navigation, and lacked compatibility with modern systems, including SFC’s growing Microsoft 365 environment.

The new platform needed to support:

Deep content publishing and metadata control
Seamless integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Power BI
Enhanced accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA) and mobile responsiveness
Secure access for defined user groups
A significantly improved search engine and UX
Ongoing flexibility to scale and evolve with SFC’s digital transformation roadmap

At the same time, SFC needed a future-ready CMS that was intuitive for non-technical teams, while supporting integration with Azure-hosted infrastructure.

The Solution

6B delivered a fully bespoke WordPress solution for the Scottish Funding Council — built with scalability, accessibility, and governance at its core. A full discovery and user research phase shaped a new information architecture and navigation model, grounded in the needs of SFC’s diverse user base — from policymakers and educators to students and journalists.

We implemented a clean, component-based WordPress CMS using Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), with custom post types for publications, statistical reports, consultations, and funding programmes. The editorial interface was tailored for ease of use and metadata precision, enabling SFC teams to manage complex structured content without developer input.

The platform integrates with SFC’s existing Dynamics CRM for subscriber management and is architected to support the future shift to Dynamics 365. Power BI dashboards and SharePoint assets are embedded where appropriate, enabling interactive publishing of live data. The site is hosted in SFC’s Microsoft Azure environment, with remote support and deployment workflows provided by 6B.

Accessibility was built into every stage of the design and development process, using semantic HTML, ARIA landmarks, keyboard navigation testing, and automated tooling to ensure full WCAG 2.1 AA compliance. We also enhanced search with SiteSearch360, delivering faceted filtering across metadata-rich content.

6B provided full training to communications and publishing teams, with documentation and ongoing support delivered through a retained partnership agreement.

The Impact

The new WordPress platform has transformed SFC’s digital presence into a reliable, modern communications channel — one that reflects its leadership in Scotland’s education sector. Site performance, usability, and accessibility have all improved, while internal teams now have full control over publishing and metadata.

The platform is aligned with SFC’s long-term digital strategy — scalable, secure, and integrated with core Microsoft systems. With this foundation in place, SFC can now respond faster to public needs, improve transparency, and publish data in more dynamic, accessible formats.

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