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City of Trees is the community forest charity for the Greater Manchester area. They plant trees to create better greener places, to boost health and wellbeing and to tackle the climate and biodiversity emergency.
The City of Trees organisation had recently spun out from their parent charity to become their own charitable trust. Following a period of organisational growth and a rebrand they needed a new website to help them build a strong and striking digital presence.
It was important for the website to clearly communicate the work that they do and and the impact that they have across Greater Manchester. A key requirement was the integration with an events management platform, as their busy schedule of volunteering and events was handled manually and was taking up a lot of time. They also wanted a slicker way for people to donate to the charity. Finally they needed it to be as futureproof as possible so that it could grow with them as they continue to evolve.
We began with our Discovery phase; running workshops for key stakeholders, enabling us to delve into the detail of the four key audience groups and their requirements for the site. Next, we reviewed the current site structure alongside their analytics data in order to understand the traffic levels for each page.
We used this information to develop a new Sitemap, which we tested this with stakeholders to ensure that all information could be easily found within the new structure. Following this we developed some black and white prototype wireframes. These allow our clients to get a sense of their new website as early as possible, and help us to gather quality feedback fast.
The next phase was UI design. The organisation had recently commissioned some new branding so we started with concept designs to trial a few ideas. Once these ideas had been discussed we could quickly roll out the agreed look and feel across the remaining pages.
Once the designs were fully approved we started work on the build, creating a bespoke theme in WordPress to show off the new City of Trees branding. The content management system enabled the client to edit all pages and areas of functionality themselves without agency support. We worked closely with their internal team throughout the process, testing integrations with Eventbrite and the Stripe payment system.
Whilst we worked on the build, the City of Trees team were busy developing the content using templates that we created for them. This meant that by the time the website was ready for the content to be uploaded, everything had been planned, written and collated to ensure that phase could be completed quickly. The Pixel Fridge team joined the City of Trees team for a day in Manchester for CMS training, demoing how the new CMS system worked, and then being on hand for questions whilst the team learnt the ropes. This ensured that by the time the content was uploaded the client team was fully confident at making edits across all aspects of the site.
The result of this process is a beautiful and usable design that provides a consistent user experience across devices and digital platforms. It is seamlessly integrated with their events platform and donations services, and the amount of time the client spent handling these areas has significantly decreased.
We continue to work with them as we support the site and look forward to enhancing it over time.
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