Developing a brand new website built on safety, functionality and heart | Introducing Youth Options
We’re looking back at an enormous project for #TeamLBB – a brand new website design and development for the incredible organisation, Youth Options.
Here at Littlebigbox, we truly do love every client that we work with. No matter what industry they are from, they all bring with them so much passion, inspiration and love for what they do. It makes our job even more fulfilling; because there’s nothing better than surrounding yourself with people who lift you up. But, now and again, a client comes along who completely blows your socks off.
For us, that client was?Youth Options.
Youth Options are an utterly incredible charity – they support children and young people who need it the most to engage, develop and become empowered to achieve a better future. Established in 1937, their ethos is inspiring: and when they approached us to help them with a brand new website development and design, we didn’t just jump at the chance: we dove in headfirst.
They needed a?bespoke website?– a totally new creation from the ground up. It was the kind of job that we could throw ourselves into both creatively and with our geek heads on (the perfect combination!).
Read on for the full lowdown of this super exciting project.
Safety first | Why Youth Options needed a brand new website.
As a charity – especially one that deals with potentially vulnerable young people – website safety is paramount. And with an approximate?30,000 websites hacked around the world and 300,000 new malware instances?produced every single day, the risks are shockingly high.
Unfortunately, this is an area where Youth Options had faced endless issues. The website would be brought down frequently due?to hacking, disrupting their service and sticking a huge spanner in the works with regards to their SEO. The site had been built on Drupal; a notoriously tricky CMS to master. Certain elements of the system had become vulnerable to safety breaches, and hacks were coming in thick and fast. The more hacks, the worse their position became: unsurprising, with?research by Crowdstrike?finding that 68% of companies encountered another ‘sophisticated intrusion attempt’ within 12 months of their first cyber attack. It seems that lightning does strike twice!
It simply wasn’t good enough. This amazing charity was out there doing life-changing work, running epic fundraising campaigns and sharing powerful stories… But there was rarely a functioning website to send people to! And even when the website was live, feedback revealed that it was hard to navigate and far from user-friendly.
“We found from feedback that the website wasn’t easy to use and people were finding it difficult to understand what we actually do as a charity and the services we offer and provide. It was also incredibly difficult for us to use in the back end, resulting in it not being updated regularly.” said Carly Redwood, Fundraising and Communications Manager at Youth Options.
While super frustrating for the team, this did mean that we could come in and approach the website with a fresh perspective, brand new and with no restraints. We were determined to make it as fabulous as possible for them.
A dynamic result for a dynamic charity.
Youth Options needed a website with high functionality: the charity runs various events, fundraising drives and often advertises new job opportunities. Alongside this, it needed to look slick and professional enough for a corporate audience, while appealing to their users.
It was a big job with many layers, but we knew we could do it!
Seamless and strategic design.
As Youth Options had hired us to create a full website from scratch, it gave us a good deal of creative license to play around with. It was, of course, crucial that we still stayed true to their brand.
Luckily, they had a beautiful colour palette to work with! We worked hard on crafting a design that spoke to their various stakeholders (all with very different backgrounds and needs). This is something that was immediately recognised by Carly and co;
“We purchased a complete website development, from scratch with hosting. What stood out was that April understood very quickly what we are about as charity and how our website needed to reflect that. Not only in terms of design and visually, but also in terms of how user friendly it needed to be.”
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It’s always a fine balancing act between designing a website that looks visually stunning and one that does the job for the people that need it. And do you know what? We think we nailed it!
Event system integration.
Youth Options has a full calendar of events that run throughout the year. They needed an event system functionality that would make it easy for people to find out about the event, add it to their calendar and sign up there and then. We achieved this by using?The Events Calendar, a versatile calendar plugin for WordPress.
Donations integration.
Similarly, it’s a huge part of the charity strategy that donations can be made with total ease. We built an engaging and 100% secure donations page which included direct donation integration. We chose to use?Give WP?for its versatility, ease of use and capabilities for repeat donations. Since launching the website with this new donations integration, donations have risen considerably with a huge boost in recurring donations.
Jobs board.
Youth Options staff are a valuable asset to the charity – they range from positions at head office, to facilitating holiday camps, working at centres and supporting young people out in the community (among many more!). They needed a one-stop shop for all jobs news: a hub of information integrated into their website where people could check in and see all of the latest jobs news. We therefore created a jobs board, with each role linking to a full jobs description with downloadable specs and information on how to apply. Using?WP Job Openings, we were also able to integrate a system whereby people could fill out an application online without needing to print out any forms and send them back.
Full SEO integration.
Following the many safety breaches on their old website, Youth Options SEO had taken a bit of a beating. We wanted to change that, giving it a full 180. Our?SEO?guru, Graham , worked on website SEO, developing a strategy alongside the YO team on how to deliver an important message to their community through structured SEO and carefully selected key phases and content.
Since launching, website views have gone up by 63%, with unique visitors from search engines shooting up by 45%. Engagement rate is high on all pages (up to 70% in some locations!) and all SEO figures are steadily rising.
One very happy team.
The final result? Pretty epic, if we do say so ourselves. Since launching, Youth Options have seen a massive increase in enquiries, as well as brilliant feedback on how clear the entire website is. Donations have grown and the team has a renewed confidence in updating the website themselves, keeping it up to date with engaging content and getting their vital message out there to as many people as possible.
“Our new website has definitely made us understand the patterns of behaviour of our users more, particularly when it comes to donations. We’ve been able to see from the users point of view who do not know anything about us, versus looking at it with all the knowledge about our organisation that we have, which – in our business – is invaluable.
We cannot thank April enough for her expertise and patience. Due to our previous website being hacked more than it was live and working, we unexpectedly moved forward the launch of our website by several weeks and – without April – we couldn’t have done it. From every design change, paragraph change, confusion on our end she was always extremely professional and went the extra mile to make sure we were happy.”
We really are overjoyed with the finished product and are so grateful to the Youth Options team for putting their trust in us.
If you have a website dream, we would love to help you make it a reality. Take a look at our?packages page?or go straight ahead and book in a free?discovery call?with us. We can’t wait to hear from you.