Nottingham Bikeworks Charity

We revamped the WordPress website for Nottingham Bikeworks, a local charity that repair donated bikes to sell and give away to people in need. Amongst other amazing projects, they recently provided bikes for Ukrainian refugees and helped key workers keep their bikes maintained over the pandemic.

I went to a course at Nottingham Bikeworks about winter-proofing my bike and mentioned to the chap running the course that their website could do with some love. By chance, he was the person responsible for it and welcomed some help! Their current site was on slow hosting with lots of plugins installed, had an awful page builder and was rather out of date. I advised on getting WordPress etc up to date and then Bikeworks asked for a redesign.

“Working with Nick has been a pleasure, from our initial meeting about updating our website right through to his continued support since we’ve launched. He took my initial (rather messy!) sketches and managed to turn them into a sleek, easy-to-navigate and easy-to-manage website, offering his insights and suggestions along the way about how to keep it in line with current trends and accessibility guidelines. Since launching the new site on eco-friendly hosting, he’s been available to help make small changes and to guide us how to make our own edits. If you’re looking to get a new website, I can’t recommend Intention enough!”
Richard, Nottingham Bikeworks

Green Web Hosting

We moved the existing site to our green web hosting, set up the free SSL and that immediately made things run faster.

Web Design

Starting with some ‘wireframes’ to make sure everything is in the right place, we created page layouts using the ‘Atkinson Hyperlegible‘ font which is easier to read for people with dyslexia or low vision. This is loaded from the website rather than Google Fonts too, as Google fonts isn’t GDPR compliant. We checked the colour contrasts throughout to make sure the text is legible and reducing the amount of text makes it easier to scan through the pages. Their excellent imagery and some icons from Noun Project we added to make the site nicer to look at that a ‘wall of text’!

We present designs using Sketch cloud, so you can see the design in a web browser rather than as a PDF or flat images. This works great as you can see how much is on screen and see the designs at actual size.

WordPress build

This design was then turned into a lightweight WordPress theme with Advanced Custom Fields Pro to create a simple page builder. Each panel can be used once or more on a page to create visually appealing content without having to learn HTML code or use a complicated theme/page builder.

The new site was tested on mobile and desktop browsers and scores great on the Google Pagespeed test. This makes the site more attractive to search engines and keeps users happy. Once the new site was live we set up ‘SMTP’ sending for the contact form to improve the chances of email enquiries making it to Bikeworks inboxes. Spam traps are constantly changing and it’s important to make sure emails get past them!

Summary

This fresh, simplified WordPress redesign for the Nottingham Bikeworks charity is quicker to load, easier to use and more accessible than the previous version. They are already receiving lots of enquires and great feedback from the refreshed website.

If you need web design and development for your charity, drop us a line or call 01636 812551 today!