St Wilfrid’s Hospice | Website build
St. Wilfrid's Hospice | Website Build
The Brief:
Starting the year with a new project is always fantastic, and when that client is a charity you can double our excitement levels! For us 2021 brought about such an opportunity. We were thankful to be recommended by our lovely client St. Catherine’s Hospice to St. Wilfrid’s Hospice in Chichester.
St. Wilfrid’s Hospice offers a range of support to their local community ranging from physical support to emotional, social, and spiritual. The hospice has recently celebrated its 35th anniversary having opened its doors in 1987 and since that time they have supported over 20,000 local people! After speaking to their team we couldn’t help but get excited to play a part and help them continue to grow this number.
After some initial discussions with the St Wilfrid’s team we quickly realised they were in need of some support, initially focussing on:
- Their website was built on an old version of Umbraco and didn’t like to be updated
- It would on occasion go offline for no particular reason
- It struggled with large quantities of traffic to the site
- The internal team had a lack of confidence in updating the system
- The range of content on site was vast, and in areas untouched for many years
Thankfully we’ve had plenty of experience in each of these areas, and we were very much up to the challenge.
The Approach:
Before moving into the design or development we worked closely with St. Wilfrid’s team; working through technical details and organisational discovery. By taking this vital step we could understand the processes and methods the team had. This made project planning and user mapping all the easier.
Following this meeting, we moved into the kick-off! Spending time with the client team to understand their community, website aspirations, organisational goals, brand, team structure, and the new content structure.
Following our kick-off meeting and Discovery Phase, our team spent time mapping all content on the website. Our aim was to re-order, prioritise and assess all current content on the website using the newly created “Keyword Research Analysis“. This enabled us to ensure all content transferred was relevant to the user/community/organisation.
Now we had a really clear picture of how the new website should present itself. We move into design.
Working from wireframe stages to full visuals we were able to begin ‘drilling’ down to the final website layout and design style. Considering the sheer size of the website we took a very iterative approach working across over 50 design templates to get to the final agreed design. After a really positive call with the STWH team we were ready to move into development.
We started this stage by creating a new staging website which enabled all stakeholders to review updates away from Google’s view. The staging website was then used to tweak and tailor each page to the requirements of the brief & client feedback. Working into the final stages we provided St. Wilfrid’s team with a series of training videos, displaying how to use their new website.
Following the move to live we’ve had some lovely feedback from the team and have gone on to work together since launch!
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