A new website for

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 challenge

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.

The work

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.