Rebranding isn’t as simple as changing your logo and nobody knows this better than Learning Partnership West (LPW), an organisation that provides support and education services for young people.
LPW were going through a major brand overhaul and asked us to revamp their website in keeping with their new brand. They had some great ideas for features and a clear idea of how they wanted the site to look and feel, but before we started anything, we needed to determine the website’s main objectives….
Defining a website’s objectives
Every website has a purpose, something the website owner wants the user to do. The first thing we do when designing a website is sit down with the client and figure out what the main objectives are.
Learning Partnership West had 3 main objectives for their new site:
- To reflect the new, fresh and modern LPW branding
- To show users what support is available
- To be easy to use for LPW administrators
Now we knew the objectives, we were able to start designing the site…
Capturing a brand in a website
A brand is so much more than just a logo and a colour palette. A brand should reflect who you are as a company and should be carried through everything you do.
While incorporating LPW’s new brand guidelines, we also included plenty of sleek, modern design features that reflected the new brand. Sliding carousels, an innovative news page and a new events calendar all helped to bring a more modern feel to the website.
We love tech and we could develop exciting new features until the cows come home. We also don’t believe in using tech just for the sake of it. We needed to make sure that while the new LPW site was modern and innovative, it was still easy to use and navigate…
Building a better user experience
With so much support to offer, LPW needed to make sure users could find exactly what they were looking for. We worked closely with the LPW team to work out an information architecture that was easy for users to navigate and get the information they needed.
We also added in some great new features to promote the support that LPW offers, including a CV building tool, a job board and an events calendar.
Building a website everyone can use
To keep a website fresh and up to date means constantly adding and updating content. The old LPW site was built using a bespoke CMS and the team told us that adding and editing content was difficult and time consuming.
We recommended building the new site on WordPress, an open source CMS that’s used by over 72 million websites around the world. There are thousands of articles online providing support on using WordPress so we knew LPW could find answers without having to pay someone every time they had an issue. We also created a manual showing them how to create pages and posts and edit their existing content.
Where are they now?
The LPW team love their new website and the way it ties in with their fresh new brand. They were particularly excited about the amount of time they’d save adding and editing content on WordPress as opposed to their old CMS.
Take a look around for yourself at http://www.lpw.org.uk/.
