Action Hampshire
Community Action Website

02.

Design

Polly, our incredible designer, loves comings up with fresh new designs and, with Action Hampshire, she loved their existing branding, so it was a case of coming up with design ideas that would meet their requirements. It is a big site and has to meet the needs of a lot of different interest groups. What we were so pleased to see was their commitment to producing content regularly and they showed a great deal of creativity, despite being hampered by a website that did not meet their needs.

For example, 2021 was their 70^th anniversary and they had produced some lovely Impact graphics, one for each year but they were unable to show them directly on the website so they had to resort to putting them on external websites and social media. They all now sit proudly on the website and look just great!

Every aspect of the design was discussed at length and we proceeded to the build when it was all signed off.

There was a significant amount of functionality required. For example, other organisations needed to be able to advertise their job vacancies and upcoming events. There is no point in reinventing the wheel, so we integrated some commercial plugins to provide this. One of the great things about WordPress is that, if there is a specific requirement, a commercial plugin is usually available to meet that need. Integrating them is not always straightforward but it is more economical than writing the code from scratch.

However, there is something that we will never buy or use a plugin for, and that is the design of a website. One of the reasons why the previous website was so challenging was because it was full of plugins to create visual effects and styles. We come across this quite often. If you lack the coding skills to write this yourself you have to resort to using other people’s code but the difficulty with doing this is that it can cause all sorts of conflicts and affect other aspects of the design.

I am proud of the fact that our bespoke designs are truly that. This is why we always create a visual mock-up and get it signed off before proceeding with the build. We need to ensure that our websites work well with all the major browsers, mobile devices and desktop computers and if you use a plugin to create a nice design effect, it can cause no end of problems.