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“Nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day, you bet on people, not on strategies.”
See the available job positions below
“Nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day, you bet on people, not on strategies.”
Design, Development and Maintenance of a public park website owned and managed by Sandwell Council, UK.
The Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council (SMBC), a local governing body in the West Midlands, UK, manages public spaces like Lightwoods Park to improve residents’ lives by offering community events and recreation. Among its treasured assets is Lightwoods Park, nestled in the heart of Bearwood on the outskirts of Birmingham, with Lightwoods House, an elegant Grade II listed building, at its centre. Recognising the value of online engagement, the council required a website for Lightwoods Park. This website aims to make the park more accessible, improve communication and promote a stronger connection with the community.
Sandwell MBC aims to promote Lightwoods Park and House as a multifaceted destination encompassing a park, a heritage house museum, and a venue available for weddings and events. Further, they would like to add and promote wedding venue hire services within the venue, and the wedding venue hire website included within the website remit. Lightwoods Park and House will stand as its own brand but under the framework of the Visit Sandwell brand.
On 27 March 2024, the Lightwoods Park and House website went live within clear milestones and under the budget.
Rethinking website design focuses on user needs by enhancing information architecture and organisation. It involved improving site navigation and wayfinding to help citizens and visitors find content more efficiently. Sweans used initial user research to establish a clear information architecture.
The UX research laid the groundwork for crafting wireframes of static global elements such as the website header, footer and other pages. These wireframes provided SMBC with a structure for establishing an intuitive content hierarchy and delivering a systematic user experience, which directed the development of future page layouts.
The redesign of the Lightwoods Park and House website commenced with a collaborative and thorough content inventory, user experience audit, and strategic planning of information architecture.
Sweans began the design effort by conducting user testing using HotJar heat mapping software to track anonymised user behaviour and metrics on the Lightwoods Park and House website. They observed mouse movements and interactions as real visitors attempted tasks, asking basic questions such as:
The findings from this testing shaped the direction of the new website, introducing a task-based approach to content strategy, information architecture and design.
Sweans then mapped step-by-step customer journeys for all major tasks on the Lightwoods Park and House site, considering visitor priorities, interactions, ease of completion and how/where tasks are completed.
User testing continued throughout the project. As the content strategy progressed and Sweans’s designers developed concepts, they tested the site map for comprehension and understanding. They also tested in-progress site designs to ensure that iterations were based on real-time user feedback rather than personal preferences or assumptions.
With our design direction and wireframes, Sweans front- and back-end engineering brought to life the new Lightwoods Park and House, a striking embodiment of the brand, powered by the WordPress content management system (CMS).
Our UI/UX designers worked diligently to give a new look and feel to a web design language. Sweans engineers collaborated closely, providing technical insights to ensure an optimal responsive web experience while staying true to the designers’ vision and effectively managing the budget. Throughout the wireframe process, both teams partnered with SMBC to align the design with their vision of a platform catering to the community. We empowered Lightwoods Park and House with a completely new content management system and experience by using the flexibility and scalability of WordPress infrastructure, enhanced through the power of Elementor WordPress Customizer.
Sweans Designers gather data by conducting conversion funnel analysis, A/B testing, heat mapping, and user testing through screen recording and surveys to understand website usage patterns better, identify friction points, and pinpoint task abandonment. Sweans then interprets the data analytics and provides client executives with insightful analysis to guide decisions to enhance user experience and boost conversion rates.
The engineering team at Sweans is actively integrating accessibility and usability to enhance ease of use for all users. We define accessibility as the elimination of barriers to ensure equal access to information, particularly for neurodivergent individuals. Usability encompasses making websites intuitive for everyone, ensuring a seamless experience from the first interaction and encouraging repeat usage. An analogy would be knowing whether to push or pull a door to open it.
We have begun prioritising people at the heart of the process, shifting away from the previous focus on processes, data evolution, key metrics, and results. This mindset previously overlooked a significant portion of the population, resulting in diminished access for users to all websites, from eCommerce to government sites, search engines, and educational platforms.
In our continuous mission to ensure sites are perceivable and error-free, we prioritise Accessibility & Usability in the initial design-development process, rather than approaching it haphazardly as most industries do. As front-end developers, we deeply understand how people use their devices to seek information or online services. We reverse the traditional site creation process at Sweans by closely listening to our users and accessibility consultants, allowing their insights to guide our work rather than designing first and asking questions second.
Sweans initiated the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) efforts for Lightwoods Park and House by conducting a comprehensive SEO audit and performing keyword research. The audit quantified the performance of the existing site, identified optimisation challenges and opportunities for improvement, and outlined a roadmap for Sweans’s SEO team.
To address the issue of duplicate content, Sweans catalogued all affected content on the Lightwoods Park and House website and collaborated with Lightwoods Park and House to gain authorisation for content consolidation where necessary. For content that needed to remain duplicated, canonical tags were added to instruct search engines on which pages to rank and which to ignore.
Regarding metadata management, Sweans’s SEO team manually crafted unique title and meta description tags for all new pages on the Lightwoods Park and House website in collaboration with Sweans’s content strategists. They ensured brand consistency in naming conventions, aligned title tags with Google searches, and utilised keyword research to incorporate actionable verbiage.
Sweans rectified temporary redirects that caused Google’s crawlers to continually revisit old links instead of crawling and indexing newer priority content. They also eliminated redirect chains that adversely affected page load speeds and prevented the passing of SEO equity from old pages to new ones.
Sweans engineers actively engaged in weekly meetings with Sandwell council teams, addressing queries and providing education and training on infrastructure best practices, platform setup, maintenance, and WordPress engineering. The ongoing engineering training and support empowered Sandwell’s team to take ownership of and responsibility for the new WordPress platform and to eliminate dependency on a single vendor.
Additionally, Sweans supplied training materials and comprehensive digital guides to assist the council in training staff, maintaining design consistency, working within WordPress, and managing the platform:
Working together, Sweans and the Sandwell Council have delivered a powerful, easy-to-use digital experience for users. Sweans embraced the latest technology and best practices to improve website performance, as well as supporting and training Sandwell staff. Following the launch, Sweans continues to partner with Sandwell Council, providing ongoing maintenance and support for improvements. User feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with visitors stating that finding information and navigating the site is easier and that the content is easier to understand. Many visitors were surprised to discover it was a government site!
Sweans completed the website in three months, launching the new Lightwoods Park and House website on time and under budget. We ensured compliance with the WCAG 2.2 level AA standard, making the Lightwoods Park and House website accessible for all users and abilities on desktop, mobile devices, and the latest browsers.
The Sandwell Council expressed great satisfaction with Sweans’s design and development work. Sweans also secured ongoing maintenance and technical support services.
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See the available job positions below
“Nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day, you bet on people, not on strategies.”
3rd Floor, 86-90 Paul Street,
London, EC2A 4NE
