South West Coastal Monitoring provide standard, repeatable, long-term coastal monitoring data for the South West coast of England since 2006.
The Goal
SWCM came to us in need of a new website – their existing site had a confusing and messy structure which had outgrown the website over time, and made it very hard for people to clearly navigate and absorb the information on its pages. The client was finding they no longer knew where to put new pages on the site, compounding the issue further. At the same time, they also decided to re-brand!
This re-brand included blending two websites into one. They were known as Plymouth Coastal Observatory and Southwest Coastal Monitoring originally, and after discussing the impact on Google search rankings and usability with us, they decided to rebrand everything and go ahead as South West Coastal Monitoring.
They therefore needed a completely new look, including a new logo and set of brand colours.
What did we do?
We went through a branding process with this client, with an initial meeting in our Exeter offices to discuss their brand feel and goals, and ensure we got a full picture before creating some logos to suit them. After a few adjustments and discussions on the logo options we presented, they found a logo and brand colour set that the client felt suited their website and approach well.
The next stage was crucial to this project – the wireframe and sitemap stage. This concerns the structure of the website, and how the pages sat in relation to each other on the site which was one of the main things the client was struggling with in their current site. It was important that we re-organise their website content, and also leave room for growth in the future. Most of these decisions were joint decisions, where we advised and gave our professional opinion and worked with the client. With a few in-person and video call meetings, we established a sitemap and wireframe structure that fitted the website needs, and also established a much more effective user-journey for website visitors to navigate.
We also made a change to how their Coastsnap system was working – this is a system to allow users to upload their images of the coastline and share with the client’s team. On the old site, the form was uploading each and every picture to the backend of the site, which increased the size of the site and slowed the website down hugely. Instead of this, we decided to introduce a Gravity Forms plugin on WordPress, which integrates the site directly with Dropbox, so any uploaded images are added straight to that account therefore reducing the load on the website and its hosting size and cost.
We also created dynamic URLs for the Coastsnap system so that when people scan the QR code at any coastal location, the form would pre-fill with the location the person was scanning from, and make the process of uploading much easier and user-friendly.
It’s time to launch
Launch process involved our usual Quality Control processes, before launch day when domain records were changed to put the site live. We ensures redirects were put in place from the old pages to the new, as quite a lot of the site structure had changed and we wanted Google to know where they had been moved to.
Not only did our design and development team do an excellent job with the build, but our SEO team played a large role in the launch to ensure the website was seen correctly by Google and the rankings and performance of the website were protected during the launch. They even looked at where they could be improved moving forward, and assisted with advice on getting the website found for their new brand name.
South West Coastal Monitoring is very happy with their new and improved site, and our team loved working with them every step of the way. They even left us some great feedback:
“It’s all looking great so far! Thanks so much for all the hard work you’ve put into this!” – Emerald
“The website looks absolutely fabulous, thank you so much for all your hard work, we are dead pleased.” – Joseff
“Thanks, Beth, and we’re excited to see it go live tomorrow too. It’s been over a year since we started this journey so thanks for your help!” – Ruth
If you’re interested to see their new site and have a little look around for yourself, you can find them here.