Redesign my website — freeFree redesign

A charity

What got better, and for whom

The boss

Funders look you up before they fund you.

  • Now it holds up.
  • They own it. They edit it. Nobody to pay.
  • Real visitor numbers, before and after. Google Analytics connected.

The people they want

Google was reading blank pages.

  • Now Google reads real pages. Page indexing fixed.
  • Search beats Facebook for finding them.
  • Strangers get it before they scroll.

The members

They asked for bigger text and pages read aloud.

  • Both are one button. Every page.
  • The office edits it that afternoon.

What I did

Every page — about 300 of them, ten years of events and stories — moved across and given a modern design. Tap a marker to see the thinking behind each part.

The rebuilt homepage, with five numbered markers explaining each decision

  1. 1A menu you can actually scan

    The old one had grown a heading for every project since 2013. This one holds the five things people actually arrive looking for. Everything else is still there, one click further in.

  2. 2Donate never disappears

    It stays in the corner as you scroll, on every page. Giving shouldn't mean going to find the giving page first.

  3. 3One sentence, in their own words

    A first-time visitor knows what this charity is before they scroll. A large share of visits to the old site never got past the first screen.

  4. 4Two things to do, not eight

    Join, or support. Those are the only two things a stranger can usefully do when they arrive, so they're the only two on offer.

  5. 5Their own members, not stock photos

    Real photographs from their own events. A funder can tell the difference in about a second.

Reading the site

The website reads itself out loud

Every page has an Accessibility button in the corner. Open it and you can have the page read to you, make the words bigger, or change the background colour — some people find black text on white slides around, and a soft blue or yellow holds still.

It remembers what you chose, so the site is already the way you like it next time you come back.

The old website had none of this. To have it read aloud you'd have had to find and install software of your own first — which is a lot to ask of somebody who just wanted to know when the next Big Night Out is.

Try it on the live site
The panel, as their members see it. Every label is written the way a person would say it.

Running it themselves

And they update it without me

The old site ran on WordPress. Changing anything meant going somewhere else, learning a second system, and hoping the result looked right. So I built them their own.

The charity's own website with a yellow editing bar across the top, reading: Back to the desk, View as a visitor, Take it off the site, Put your changes live
The page you edit is the page people see. Click the words, type. The yellow bar is the only difference between editing and visiting — and every button on it says plainly what it does.
The Backstage desk: a large drop zone reading 'New post — drop a PDF, Word file or pictures here, or start a blank post', a search box, and a list of posts
Drop the monthly magazine PDF in, and the first draft writes itself. They were already making that magazine every month. Now making it is also how the website gets updated.

Changing a sentence, before

  1. Go to a different web address and sign in
  2. Find the right screen among dozens of menus
  3. Type into an editor that looks nothing like your website
  4. Open a preview in another tab to see what it will really look like
  5. Go back. Fix it. Preview again.
  6. Publish, and wait

Changing a sentence, now

  1. Open your own website
  2. Click the words and type
  3. Press Put your changes live

There is no second version of the website to imagine. What you're typing into is the page.

Curious what yours would show?

I'll look at your website the same way and tell you what I find — whether or not you ever take me up on the free redesign.

Redesign my website — free

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