The National Forest
Website Migration
Wide User Research
100% Accessibility Compliance
Brief
The National Forest is an environmental project spanning over 200 square miles across three counties - Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Staffordshire.
Zoocha led the website transformation and modernization to migrate three legacy websites to one single platform after winning the opportunity to work on the project through an open tender published on G-Cloud.
Collectively re-aligning the National Forest online brand and portfolio of websites as one - to promote the National Forest and future proofing inline with their product roadmap:
- Migrate three sites to one single Drupal 8 CMS platform to modernise the architecture and provide ownership of the content to reduce development expense
- Create a method for online transactions to simultaneously collect donations and provide ecommerce functionality for shop products
- Create a search feature to enable users to explore the National Forest and plan their trip
- Allow users to book ‘Plant a tree’ experiences online and reduce the back office admin overhead
- Improve upon the limited editing capabilities and the high reliance on developer time to make updates
Solution
National Forest are a Charity that work closely with Defra, and therefore adherence to the GOV.UK Service Manual was adopted as a best practice approach to achieving project success:
- Discovery, Alpha, Beta and Live approach
- Stakeholder workshops to establish the wider project scope
- Research directly with National Forest users to establish needs, motivations, goals and pain points.
- Card sorting to establish an evidenced information architecture that will meet user needs
- Information Architecture mapping and iterative testing
- User journey mapping and wireframe iterations to produce informed user journeys through the website
- Iterative user testing to enhance best practice and ensure the site works for users
- Fully managed development roadmap to take the site to Live
Technical highlights
A high performing Drupal 8 CMS with National Forest enabled with full content control and publishing capabilities giving the National Forest the ability to enhance its online presence:
- CRM integration with “Access ThankQ CRM” to maintain consistency across National Forest campaigns
- Bespoke design implementation that allows the National Forest to ‘stand out’ from competitor websites
- Robust ecommerce solution using Drupal Commerce facilitating ‘Plant a tree’ experiences and dedications, as well as future proofed shop functionality to help National Forest grow their brand licencing strategy
- Measurable donations facility - demonstrating how and when campaigns increase donations
- Ongoing analytics analysis and sprint iterations to enhance website performance
- Custom Paypal subscription donation ability
- Fully mobile responsiveness and WCAG2.0 AA compliant
- Award winning website, achieving OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN MOBILE DEVELOPMENT
