Prairie Diagnostic Services is Saskatchewan’s veterinary diagnostic laboratory. Its customers are veterinary clinics, not the public, and what they need from the website is narrow and constant: which test to order, what sample it needs, what it costs, and where the form is. The old site technically held all of that, but it had a content management system that rendered the same submitted font at three different sizes for reasons nobody could explain, so the lab’s staff had given up and started posting information as PDFs instead. The information was there. It just wasn’t on the web in any useful sense.
We rebuilt the site so that pages are pages again, and so the test catalogue could come in from the system PDS already had. Every test is now a page in its own right, pulled in from the lab’s own feed and refreshed on a schedule, and every test can be found by species or by lab section — bacteriology, virology, serology, parasitology, histology, cytology, toxicology and the rest. Submission forms stayed as downloadable PDFs, because that is genuinely what a form should be, and they are sorted by species so nobody hunts. The client portal PDS built in-house was left alone and linked to. Hosting, backups, monitoring and same-day help are ours to worry about rather than the lab’s.
