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New website showcases traditional craft skills in the UK

me&you designed a contemporary new website to celebrate and showcase heritage crafts.

Challenge

Heritage Crafts is a national charity set up to celebrate, support and safeguard traditional craft skills in the UK. They currently list 261 crafts, many of which are on their Red List of Endangered Crafts.

The charity’s core team selected me&you to help them create a fresh new user-friendly website. It would need to align with the charity’s core values and help them achieve their goals. These goals included:

  • Increasing their membership by streamlining and automating their sign up form process and payment systems to meet a growing demand for memberships
  • Enhancing the brand experience for visitors by bringing three existing websites seamlessly into one 
  • Aligning the website with their updated brand guidelines and ensuring it met WCAG accessibility standards
  • Improving the overall design, layout and navigation of the site, particularly for visitors accessing the site on mobile devices

The project would also involve developing a searchable Maker’s Directory where skilled makers could create their own online profile to promote their work. In addition, the site would require a platform to celebrate award winners and bursary and grant recipients, and an interactive membership portal with exclusive resources for members. 

The project was funded by Heritage Fund UK and made possible by money raised by National Lottery players.

See the new website here

Solution

Once our initial research and discovery stages were complete, we created a new site map showing how the content from the three original sites could be structured on the new site.

With an approved site map in place, we were able to produce a design system defining the overall user experience (UX) and user interfaces (UI) which made up the whole website. Key content blocks and pages were designed in both mobile and desktop formats to demonstrate their flexibility. We then shared these elements with our client as a prototype link, onto which they could pin their comments.

The new website design is much more modern and accessible, amplifying the message that the charity is an authoritative ‘voice for craft’ and helping them to appear more credible and relevant to their audience. The site design better reflects the brand’s visual look and feel and enhances their existing photography.

To ensure the longevity and sustainability of the website, we reduced the number of third party plugins the website relied on. The site was a bespoke Wordpress development. This included two-way integration with CRM and a simple paywall experience for member related services and events purchases. 

We worked with Heritage Crafts in house team to support the content population of the site and were able to successfully deliver a complex website in a relatively short time frame.

Impact

The new site has helped the Heritage Crafts staff team to reduce the amount of time they were spending on admin.

Their previous operational process involved adding members manually, once on the separate Makers website and again on their CRM Agile system. This administrative process has been removed by having an automatic live connection between the new website, Agile CRM system and their chosen new Stripe payment system.

The previous site relied on a number of plugins which sometimes conflicted with each other. The new site development reduced their dependence on third party plugins, therefore reducing the risk of such issues occurring in the future.

The new ‘exclusive content’ feature on the Members Portal, allows Heritage Crafts staff to upload interactive content such as talks they host, live discussions with makers and promotional events tailored for specific crafts/makers.

With a sleek and simple layout and clearer navigation, the new image-driven website site is now a fantastic showcase for high quality craftsmanship. The website now appeals to and functions for a wider range of age groups from young people (15+) to older generations (60+).

It has been positively received by both the Heritage Crafts team and the craft makers themselves.

The new improved site, and the value it provides to members, has given Heritage Crafts the confidence to implement a new pricing structure for their memberships. They have already seen an increase in users subscribing for higher membership tiers, in turn increasing their revenue.

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