A new website for
- Content Strategy
- UX Design
- UI Design
- Web Development
- Support
King Charles III Charitable Fund (working name of The Prince of Wales’s Charitable Foundation) was set up more than forty years ago. The Fund’s mission is to transform lives and build sustainable communities through grant making, social investment and incubation of initiatives and projects.
The Fund has invested more than £100 million in charitable causes in the UK and overseas. The website was used to disseminate information about the charity’s and its impact, as well as managing online small grant applications from community organisations.
The challenge
Pixel Fridge was invited to tender for the Fund’s website refresh project. Following a successful process, Pixel Fridge was commissioned to redevelop and deliver a WordPress website which repositions the Fund as a dynamic and progressive grant maker with a big impact, and supported by a small team.
With this came the opportunity to revisit the overall structure and design of the website to reflect the changing priorities of the Fund. The team were keen to introduce an interactive map to show the scale and breadth of projects being funded and migrate associated content from the existing Drupal site to the new WordPress site. They also required a CMS that was much easier to use with minimal agency support and they were keen for the new site to be designed and built to deliver a reduction in digital carbon emissions.
The work
Starting with a detailed Discovery phase, we identified the main priorities for the site via some in-person workshops with the whole team. A review of Google Analytics data showed us how the current site was used, and which content was most popular vs which content perhaps didn’t need to be migrated. We developed user profiles for the different audiences in order to ensure that each group would get their requirements met from the new website.
Once we’d established the new site structure, we developed some black and white prototype wireframes. Refining these via client feedback allowed us to achieve a plan for the user journey across the site and page layouts.
Next, we moved on to UI design. This phase was a little more challenging, since due to tight timelines we needed to design the website while the team worked on proposed branding assets. By working closely and collaboratively with the Fund’s branding team we were able to ensure that the visual approach we took for the website would be on-brand but also suitable for web from a usability and accessibility point of view.
From here we moved on to the web build. Starting with front-end templates that reflected the approved designs, followed by a WordPress CMS and other third party integrations. An important feature on the website was the small grant application form. This was recreated in an existing third party integration based on the improved content flow that we had designed during our UX phase, to ensure that completion of the application form was as easy as possible for the applicants. Writing a script for the content migration meant that shifting nearly five hundred articles from the old site to the new was smooth and efficient.
The new website has helped support the Fund through a period of change, the fresh design reflecting the new positioning of the charity. It provides an intuitive way for the charity’s stakeholders including the public to find out more about what the charity does and has simplified the grant application journey. The current site is hosted on carbon neutral servers, and the environmental impact of the site has been significantly reduced from the previous website. The team have been able to master the CMS, enabling them to continue to update the website as they support more and more good causes. We’re looking forward to working with them over the next year, helping to refine and enhance the site over time based on usage reviews and recommendations.
The whole team couldn’t have been more patient and understanding from start to finish. The end product is beautiful website with all the functions we need and all the customisability we could want. Any challenges were clearly communicated to us, and the team went above and beyond to find solutions – particularly around the slightly unusual late night launch.
Yvonne Abba-Opoku, Head of Governance and Operations at King Charles III Charitable Fund
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