Building WordPress in weeks

Just before the end of 2020 Cygnet was contacted by a client to introduce us to Charity IT Leaders, who needed their core website rebuilt in a timeframe of just a few weeks. Not only did we manage to come in on time and budget, but there was some capacity left over for adding all the bells and whistles.

"I love working with Pete and Nick at Cygnet Digital. From the first meeting they really understood CITL and what we’re about. They’re incredibly positive about what can be done, very creative about solutions, yet always realistic. I never have any surprises about costs or timeframes, they’re completely upfront about what will be needed and how long it will take. I completely trust their advice. They put client needs first, and will give you the best solution, even if that means they lose out on a fee. Although they stay on task, they also have an eye to the wider objectives, and have really helped map out our digital journey. They are truly partners in our organisation, and I have no doubt we’ll be working together for a long time to come as our organisation continues to grow and develop."

Tree Hall - Charity IT Leaders

Flexible and fast - First deploy in 7 days

When a client approaches us with complex requirements on a tight deadline, our first port of call is identifying their Minimum Viable Product. MVP is a design methodology which promotes deploying a slim of your product as quickly as possible and only building features that are absolutely necessary. In the case of Charity IT Leaders, their MVP was a handful of their existing landing pages they felt were essential to their members.

Building modules

Armed with this information, our next step was to break these pages down into editable "modules" which could be added to pages in various orders to recreate the existing pages. An example of one of these modules was the "Hero Module" (see below) which allowed for a custom background, heading, description and call to action button:

These modules were an essential part of the website rebuild as they gave the client the ability to add & edit pages (something that was not possible on their previous website). After some basic training, the CITL team were able to begin inputting content and planning out additional pages. Over the next few days, the modules were tweaked, content was put into the pages and the MVP version of the site was complete.

At this point, the initial prototype usually get used as the basis for further testing and development; however the CITL were so confident that we ended up making it live.

With the site now live, we began adding in the rest of the functionality. This included the new and improved "Linked in & News Feed", "Events" and a few extra modules to help. By the time we had a "like for like" on the existing site, there was some additional time for two "nice to have" items on the snag list:

Page Speed Insights

If you have read any of our other content, we tend to put an emphasis on Google's "Page Speed Insights". If you aren't familiar with them, these are the technical metrics that Google uses to identify how accessible a website is. In the case of CITL, we were able to structure the homepage and optimise asset delivery to achieve an incredible 99/100 score.

Jobs Board

Through our conversations with CITL we discovered that having a simple jobs board would be ideal for generating traffic and delivering additional value to their members. Since there was some budget left on the project, we decided to help them design a jobs board which allowed members to submit jobs and users facet filter for industry specific attributes such as "Type of Charity". This proved to be a brilliant success with 6 jobs being added within the first 10 days of launch.