A charity in Edinburgh
Three things were quietly costing them supporters, and none of them were visible by looking at the site. Here's what I found, in plain English.
What was wrong
The staff email addresses on the site had been typed in slightly wrong. So when somebody read about a course, decided to make contact and clicked the address, they didn't get an email window. They got "page not found".
Most people don't try twice. They assume nobody's there.
Now Every address on the site opens an email properly.
Their events calendar had been quietly creating a new, empty page for every date it could think of — years into the past and the future. Google found four times more pages than the charity actually has, and gave up on hundreds of them.
Search is how most people find this charity — it brings in far more visitors than Facebook was sending them. So this mattered.
Now Pages exist because somebody wrote them. Nothing is manufactured.
The site looked busy. It wasn't. Nearly all of that activity was automated software — most of it trying to break in. Underneath the noise, the real audience was a small fraction of what all that activity suggested.
Nobody knew how small that audience was, because nothing was measuring it.
Now They can see their real visitors, week by week — and the new site has no back door to break into.
What I did
Every page — about 300 of them, ten years of events and stories — moved across and given a modern design. Tap a marker to see the thinking behind each part.
The old one had grown a heading for every project since 2013. This one holds the five things people actually arrive looking for. Everything else is still there, one click further in.
It stays in the corner as you scroll, on every page. Giving shouldn't mean going to find the giving page first.
A first-time visitor knows what this charity is before they scroll. A large share of visits to the old site never got past the first screen.
Join, or support. Those are the only two things a stranger can usefully do when they arrive, so they're the only two on offer.
Real photographs from their own events. A funder can tell the difference in about a second.
Reading the site
This charity is for adults with disabilities. Reading a screen is genuinely hard for a lot of their members — so I asked what would help, and they told me.
Every page has an Accessibility button in the corner. Open it and you can have the page read to you, make the words bigger, or change the background colour — some people find black text on white slides around, and a soft blue or yellow holds still.
It remembers what you chose, so the site is already the way you like it next time you come back.
These weren't my idea. The members asked for them.
The old website had none of this. To have it read aloud you'd have had to find and install software of your own first — which is a lot to ask of somebody who just wanted to know when the next Big Night Out is.
Try it on the live siteRunning it themselves
The old site ran on WordPress. Changing anything meant going somewhere else, learning a second system, and hoping the result looked right. So I built them their own.
Changing a sentence, before
Changing a sentence, now
There is no second version of the website to imagine. What you're typing into is the page.
Being straight with you: the new site and this editor are both finished, and the charity hasn't switched over to them yet — that decision is theirs and it isn't made. The three problems further up didn't wait for any of it; I sent those over as soon as I found them.
I'll look at your website the same way and tell you what I find — whether or not you ever take me up on the free redesign.
