Featured Website: Friends of Hell Wath

As a North Yorkshire based agency, we’re very passionate about supporting local businesses and charities, and especially those who make a difference to the community. Friends of Hell Wath is one of these charities who recently came to us for a solution to sharing regular news on a website.

Hell Wath is a historic green space located on the edge of Ripon between the ancient city and the UNESCO site of Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal. The Friends of Hell Wath are a friendly group of volunteers who maintain and manage the different areas including a nature reserve, historic agriculture sites, the River Skell and more. As a space that is enjoyed by many members of our team and their families, we were only too happy to help and to offer a reduced fee for such a great cause.

The project brief was to design a simple site that the Friends of Hell Wath (FOHW) could edit themselves by way of adding news and events and being able to easily update the existing page content. Their previous online presence was mainly through regular Facebook updates, but they were ready to take it to the next level with a website.

We proposed a WordPress site using a bespoke theme designed by our Graphic Illustrator, Paul. The brief for the home page was a clean bright page that provided good imagery and introductory content about the what the FOHW did as well as clear call to action buttons for further information and how to become a member. Below this, custom built WordPress blocks display all the latest news and events and at the foot of the page the contact and partner information is displayed with a map.

For the internal pages, a simple two column custom block with photo options was built so that rich content could easily be added to a blank page template as well sidebar call to action widget blocks that could be added or removed.

Just a single front end WordPress plugin was used in the build to avoid conflicts and site load speed issues as well as the WordPress ‘bloat’ normally associated with multiple plugin designs.

The FOHW also had a large selection of images to choose from which made the job of finding the right images for the website a lot easier.

The client have been more than happy with their new site, sharing the news of it across Facebook and local community groups:

“An exciting day today. Our website went live today.
We would like to blow the horn for Bronco who offered us a significant reduction in the set up costs and the Skell Valley Project who have funded this. Also thanks to Gary Camplejohn who bought the domain for us the first place and set off us down this route.
We hope you like it. The news and dates will be regularly updated on the site.”

If you’re looking for a new website or a fresh new look for your existing site, we can take on jobs big or small! Find out more about our web design service and get in touch to see what we can do for you.