What is CSEDS?
One name, three businesses, and a website that had to admit it.
The problem of one name over three businesses.
What does a thirty-year-old firm say first, when it has quietly become three companies?
CSEDS Australia has been engineering since 1991. It is a consulting practice, a supplier of construction products — Barchip, TrueGrid, TripStop, Prestige Modular — and the Australian channel for a shelf of international engineering software. One name over all three, and one website trying to carry them.
Who is the consulting for?
Councils and developers who need an engineer, not a catalogue. It sells on judgement, and thirty years of it.
Who are the products for?
Specifiers and builders. They want compliance ratings, load data and a datasheet — fast.
Who is the software for?
Practising engineers buying licences. They want to know the tool is supported locally by someone who uses it.
“Every visitor reads something written for somebody else.”
What one voice for all three would have done
How did CSEDS solve this?
One shell. Change exactly one variable.
Every template shares the same header, type, labels, feature lists and footer. The only thing that moves between them is the accent.
What I did
Product and web design, solo, working directly with the founder over a few weeks in 2025. A landing page, a product template, a software template and the mobile pass — designed in Figma and built by me, through to the live site at csedsaust.com.au.
So how does one website carry three businesses at once?
Let me walk you
through it, page by page.
What is this company?
Where is the product I came for?
The front door answers “what is this company” before it sells anything. Then one row per product: icon, photograph, name, four features. Repeat. Thirty years of catalogue, made navigable.
One row per product — Prestige Modular, Barchip, TrueGrid, TripStop
Does it meet the spec?
- ProductLivin Modular
- ClaimBAL-FZ
- MeaningThe highest bushfire attack level
csedsaust.com.au/service/livin-modular
A specifier arrives already knowing what they want. So the template front-loads the compliance claim, then gives them the assembly table, the workflow, and the questions they were going to email anyway.
Every product page is this page with its content swapped. That is what makes it a template rather than a design.
Claim first
The rating, before the description.
The spec table
Design, factory manufacture and applications, in one assembly table.
Workflow & FAQ
Three steps, then the questions that would have been an email.
Enquiry
The form, at the end of the argument.
The product template — Livin Modular
What changes for software?
Same shell. One variable moved.
The accent goes oxide red and the subject changes to ATENA, CivilGeo and DeepExcavation — but the grid, the type scale, the feature lists and the footer are the products template, untouched. Nothing was redesigned to make this page; a value was changed.
Accent
Steel blue becomes oxide red. This section of the page has done the same.
Subject
Specialist software for serious practice.
Everything else
The products template, as it was.
The one value that moved
Products — steel blue
Can I use it on site?
Most of the traffic is a specifier on a site with one hand free.
The feature lists stack, the spec table becomes a single column, and the quote button stays reachable — the hierarchy survives the narrow measure because it was never carried by the layout.
The same page, one hand free
That’s the visitor’s side.
But the site has a second reader — whoever makes the fifth product page.
A firm that has spent thirty years adding to its catalogue will keep adding to it. That was the actual brief underneath the stated one. The test of this work is not how the launch looked — it is whether the next page can be made by someone who was never in the room.
There were two other ways to do this. Both were real options, and both fail for a reason worth drawing.
Flatten them into one
- One voice
- One template
- Everyone reads somebody else’s page
Rejected. A council specifier and a licence buyer get the same page.
Split them into three
- Three sites
- Three identities
- A thirty-year firm looks like three small ones
Rejected. The age and the range stop counting for anything.
One shell, one variable
- One shell
- One variable moves
- Each line reads as its own
Taken. Three businesses, and still visibly one company.
What the visitor ends up with
The same proof block, in red
The software page’s proof section and footer are the landing page’s, with one value changed. Nobody had to design them twice.
What went over
It is live at csedsaust.com.au, and the next product does not need me.
I designed and built it. That is the reason the template argument is more than a diagram: the thing that had to survive contact with a real build was a rule I had to implement myself, so there was nowhere for a nice idea to hide.
What I’d do differently
No before-and-after traffic, no enquiry numbers and no user testing. I don’t have a capture of the old site either, so the “before” here is described rather than shown. The strongest evidence I can offer is that the site is live and you can go and use it.
The part I’d push harder is the consulting line. It got the shell and the grid, but not the same argument the other two got — it sells on judgement, and judgement is the hardest thing to put in a feature list.