Design, Build & Hosting for The Centre for Climate Repair

The challenge

The Climate Repair website required a refresh to make it feel more modern and also to address issues in the architecture of the content. Content was often hidden behind multiple clicks and didn’t present the information it needed to at the right moment.

Editors of the site also talked at length about issues they had when working with the content. Often the content they added would not look the same in draft as it did when published, causing significant frustration.

They also had problems creating the layouts they wanted, as the site lacked the necessary components. As a result, many of the pages contained hand-styled content with embedded HTML, that was difficult to update and didn’t fit in with the overall design of the site.

The method

The first step in the refresh process was to create a new design. This allowed us to quickly iterate over what Climate Repair wanted to improve upon, new features they needed, and where their existing content didn’t meet their requirements.

After analysing the site it was found that most of the content was correct, but needed updating to ensure that the site could capture additional information and the hand-styled elements could be reworked and properly captured in the CMS. The structural changes to the content were carried out alongside the redesign, to ensure the refreshed website would be coherent.

The content types were analysed to ensure that they were fit for purpose. As the site has a bit of history, there were a few content types that had been created but were no longer in use, so we could streamline the editor experience there.

If content was deleted, where possible redirects were put in place, to ensure that missing pages wouldn’t cause problems on the site in the future or impact already gained SEO scores.

Some content types, like events, did not contain enough structural elements to capture all of the information they needed to display to the public. As a result, the event content type was modified to include extra fields so that it could better represent the content they wanted to display.

A number of new components were added to the site that allowed content to be added more flexibly, moving editors away from needing to hand-style components with HTML. For example, a list of resources used to be hand-coded by editors, but the new site has a component for this display format, which both enhances the editor experience and ensures the coherence of the overall design.

During the project we also discovered that there were many best practice Drupal configurations that weren’t yet in place. These issues were recorded and added to the task list as part of the update of the site, to facilitate things like delivering a stronger SEO profile, automated accessibility checking, responsive image styles for a better mobile experience, a robust search solution and automated redirects.

Summary

Although the client initially came to us asking for a rebuild of their website, we felt that upgrading was the most practical and cost efficient option. The site was already well built and running on Drupal 10. The content was solid; it just needed to be better presented to users, along with improvements to the content editing experience.

Integrations were largely unaffected, and we avoided rushing development and creating unnecessary technical debt simply to keep within budget.  In this particular case, a full rebuild would have cost more and added complexity without clear benefits.

By using the existing site data, we could redesign the structure and navigation to make meaningful UX improvements, without expensive migration or time-consuming re-entry of hundreds of pages of content. We were also able to use past analytics data and user feedback to focus on the right improvements. This approach allowed for a faster launch with clear, visible benefits, while keeping existing SEO value, and maintaining familiar workflows for editors.