Introducing Fiducian — our newest Partner Site of the Month, designed and developed by Croissant & Baguette. Built with Hugo and optimized for editing on CloudCannon, Fiducian’s new site replaced a monolithic WordPress install, giving users a much cleaner editing interface, as well as significant performance gains.

Major speed and performance gains Direct link to this section

Fiducian is an ASX-listed diversified financial group, with multiple services and offerings — meaning their website is necessarily large, with a lot of content. Normally that would bring two problems to a static site: steadily increasing build times as the site grew, and the potential for inefficiencies in managing and editing content. But that’s where Croissant & Baguette stepped in.

Croissant & Baguette introduced Hugo, the static site generator built for speed. Hugo‘s build speed consistently beats that of other SSGs, and its benefits extend to site visitors — it also creates lean and clean HTML, optimized for SEO.

To help Fiducian efficiently manage their existing content and build new pages, Croissant & Baguette designed and developed the website in a block format using CloudCannon’s page-building tools. Now Fiducian team members can build completely new pages in CloudCannon’s Visual Editor by selecting and assembling components from their pool of more than 30 page elements.

Croissant & Baguette Technical Director Alex Luttringer is particularly pleased with the combination of Hugo and CloudCannon's CMS:

With Hugo and CloudCannon, Fiducian loads on average ten seconds faster than it did previously. Fiducian’s editors can build entirely new and on-brand landing pages in just minutes — a task that had been complex and time-consuming, if not impossible, on the old WordPress site.

Filtering by location: find a financial planner Direct link to this section

With more than sixty associated financial planners available across Australia, there’s no shortage of help available to Fiducian’s clients. And to help clients find a financial planner closest to them, Luttringer worked on a particularly intricate filtering tool with multiple selection methods.

Like many of Croissant & Baguette’s designs, it appears simple and elegant from the user’s perspective, but it contains hundreds of lines of logic and filtering in order to address all of the relevant conditions and varying data — not just a planner’s location at state, territory, and regional levels, but associating both individual Fiducian members and teams working together within offices.

Comprehensive design refresh Direct link to this section

In addition to the full site build, Croissant & Baguette also completed a branding refresh for Fiducian, encompassing everything from a new color palette to comprehensive guidelines for all website UI and navigation elements — as well as the components that form the basis of the CloudCannon editing experience.

Overall, Fiducian is a fantastic example of clean, modern design underpinned by reliable and efficient development work. With CloudCannon, it’s easy to update and add new content; with Hugo, the site builds incredibly quickly; and thanks to Croissant & Baguette, Fiducian knows their website will continue to work seamlessly.

About Croissant & Baguette Direct link to this section

Croissant & Baguette is a boutique digital agency based in Sydney, Australia. A CloudCannon Partner and CloudCannon Expert agency, they specialise in digital transformation and innovation, with a focus on best practices, performance, and premium quality projects.

About Fiducian Direct link to this section

Fiducian is an ASX-listed diversified financial group offering funds management, financial planning, platform administration, financial planning software and administration systems development.