Engagement Website for Sight Support West of England
Engagement website development for Sight Support West of England, a charity supporting Blind and Partially Sighted People
About Sight Support West of England
Sight Support West of England works with Blind and Partially-Sighted people across the region, empowering them to lead active and fulfilling lives. Currently over 53,000 people in the West of England are living with sight loss – so the charity has a really important role to play.
In 2018 the organisation formed a partnership with Wiltshire Sight to further increase its effectiveness and coverage, as well as minimising costs through shared resources. The redesign of the organisations’ websites was identified as a prime opportunity to pursue these objectives and a procurement process followed for the implementation of a new shared platform.
We were pleased to have been selected to deliver the new platform as we knew the project would be an ideal fit, harnessing our extensive experience around accessible, engaging design and efficient, cost-effective development.
Accessible Design
We started the project by exploring a confident and colourful design based on a ribbon concept for a striking homepage and header area.
Following feedback and collaboration with the Partnership’s team, we expanded the design with custom iconography for the each of the primary calls to action, with each of the icons neatly featuring an accent colour tied into the website’s colour ribbon.
We firmly believe attractive and visually-pleasing presentation doesn’t have to come at the expense of accessibility. For example, the colourful focus effect on each of the primary calls to action is an appealing design touch and tactile quality that also enhances accessibility.
There’s also baked-in accessibility features within the design to enable easy adjustment of contrast and font size and quick skipping of header content for users of screen-reader devices.
Within the website header we implemented a simple tab feature that users can interact with to switch between Sight Support and Wiltshire Sight content. This elegant solution enables partner-specific information to be readily accessed as well as shared information to be presented without duplication of content.
Engagement Website Features
Underpinning the design is the versatile and ever-popular WordPress Content Management System. WordPress has delivered three key benefits to the project: it’s easy to use for editors, it features an accessible admin dashboard and it’s available via an open-source model, without ongoing licence fees.
As registered charities, donations are essential to help Sight Support West of England and Wiltshire Sight carry out their vital work. We integrated the new website with PayPal and GoCardless transaction gateways to enable users to support the organisations by making ad hoc donations, or setting up regular direct debits.
The website also enables effectively promotion of the Partnership’s broad calendar of support and fundraising events. Users can find events near to them by entering their postcode and events can also be filtered by category, such as Social, Information and Advice and Sport.
The Results
The new website is bright, intuitive and welcoming and effectively sets out the Partnership’s services and events.
The design’s templates are highly accessible, as well as engaging, and present information in a clear and professional manner.
Behind the scenes, the move to a single WordPress platform has dramatically streamlined website administration and made the editorial process easier and more efficient.
We are delighted to have had the opportunity to work with Sight Support West of England and Wiltshire Sight and help support their vital work enriching the lives of Blind and Partially-Sighted people.