A new website for St David's Hospice Care
24th January 2023
St David's Hospice Care's last website was built in 2012. With tech changing every couple of months and mobile phones generating roughly 60% of website traffic it was clear that the website was well overdue a responsive upgrade.
With the average life span of a website now being a short 2 years and 7 months, it's no wonder that over the 10 years St David's had their existing website, it developed, grew and got a whole load of new content. Things were looking a bit cluttered, with lots of extra pages in the main navigation, so our first step was to assess the existing website, see what content was where and whether it could be condensed down anywhere.
Not only had the content and list of pages grown, but the charity had developed so much over the 10 years that naturally, their services and offering required some different processes.
Luckily for us, we've worked with St David's Hospice Care for a long time, so had all of their assets to hand and were equipped with a good understanding of their events, campaigns and services.
The website building process
Our process is generally quite similar for most of our websites, starting with a meeting to determine what features and pages your website needs to have.
1. Your wishlist
First of all we determine your *ultimate* wishlist. How many pages do you need? Are there any swanky things you'd love to add to your website? What could streamline the way that your business works? What could make things easier for the user? St David's wishlist included a content managed website, news page, integrated e-commerce to replace Shopify & booking system for events.
2. Picking *must have* features in-line with budget.
We'll give you a quote and then we can decide what's in and out of budget and how we could tailor these to work with your budget.
3. Design
The fun part (for us) begins. Once we know exactly what you need we can start designing. As this website was content managed we were able to design each layout for each feature and populate with text/imagery after build.
4. Build
Our web developer handles the build of the website. The St David's Hospice Care website was a fully bespoke, which means we didn't use any templated websites like Squarespace or Wix. This gave us full flexibility to build exactly what the client needed.
5. Population
As this was a content managed website the populating of the website could (mainly) be done at the end. Alongside the St David's team we populated the website with text, imagery and uploaded the events/shop products. Don't underestimate how important good text is on your website!
Streamlining new & existing processes
Due to the age of the existing website, there were a lot of processes that could now be streamlined to make it easier for the user or to save staff time.
- We swapped their existing Shopify for a custom-built e-commerce. This is an investment, but a money saver in the long run as subscription fees for templated e-commerce sites can slowly eat into your profits.
- A booking system for events, keeping everything under one roof. This allows users to purchase tickets on the website and lets staff manage bookings/numbers on the back-end of the website.
- A large array of content managed pages (the largest we’ve ever done!). 80% of the website is editable, which means it can grow and change as St David’s Hospice Care do and they won't have to come back to us to make simple amends.
- Easier ways for users to make donations. Previously, St David's relied on donations being made at events, on JustGiving or sometimes even via forms. By adding an easy donate option to the website we’ve now digitised this process which will make it easier and quicker for users to make a donation.
- Vacancies and the ability to apply for vacancies on the website with flexible forms that can be tailored depending on the application.
- Combining existing pages that had minimal content on and merging them to reduce the amount of pages on the website. Less stuff for the user to scroll through!
Lots and lots of features, and an exciting challenge for our small but mighty team.
By adding an easy donate option to the website we’ve now digitised this process making it as simple as possible for users to donate.
Commissioning photography & video
We spent 3 days at the hospice with Leigh, gathering video footage and photography to populate the website.
Some may have preconceived ideas of what a hospice is like, so we really wanted the video to show the warmth & care of the hospice in Malpas, the wonderful staff and the variety of services the charity offer completely free of charge.
Despite a sensitive subject at its core, it was important to both us and the team at St David's that we photographed real patients and staff with real stories. The result is a beautiful selection of candid photography, which we think really shows how much love & care the staff at St David's Hospice Care put into each day.
