Working closely with the Hospice team, we created a new site (built in Drupal 8 CMS) that truly does justice to the incredible care and support that Bolton Hospice offers to all those who need it. The site design prioritises the voices and stories of real staff, patients and families and reflects the needs of a very diverse range of site users (with planning, design and development all underpinned by in depth user testing, at each stage of the project). The Hospice already had a strong, locally recognisable brand and the site allows that to come to the fore now online. 

The site is built on incredibly flexible templates, which allow the hospice team to build up the site, and gives almost full editorial control to them.

The site includes a searchable training resource areas; the hospice team can add resources, categorise them in multiple ways, also also link to individual resources throughout the rest of the site where appropriate. This means that, for the user, the experience is incredibly valuable; searching, filtering and sorting all formats of resource content as needed.

The previous web presence for the Hospice included some microsites (for example, for their Lottery), which we rationalized and included in the main site build. A unique URL still serves traffic to these pages on the site, and the pages have a different look and feel to them (to reflect the Lottery branding), although they are all still built on core templates. However, the team can manage the content in one, central CMS – and importantly, the Lottery content can be promoted throughout the wider site.  

The website integrates with WorldPay and eDirectDebit for payments, and there is a new online shop, enabling the Hospice to sell products and support their fundraising - vital when the shops themselves are unable to open.

Since launch, the site as performed well – this Christmas saw a record breaking intake from the online shop, and search performance for the new site has been retained from the previous site’s levels.