Partner Site of the Month: Fiducian, by Croissant & Baguette

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

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

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

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

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

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