Social Enterprise Charity Design

BACKGROUND: Sycamore Gardening is a social enterprise project for the charity Hull YFC. The enterprise is a collection of small businesses setup to provide stable work/training for vulnerable young adults.

BRIEF: The first project for YFC is a gardening business. I was given the opportunity to lead the design direction and implement a full range of digital and print branding.

As the business required full branding it gave me an opportunity to design an SVG logo that would specifically target good SEO when used on the website. SVG and vector logos are fast to load on a website and can be scaled to any size without looking pixilated/blurred. I can also add meta data which will enhance local search rankings.

The process was started by sharing some initial concept. Rather than jumping straight in to full page visuals it’s quicker to general smaller sections to ensure you’re happy with the direction I’m heading. This way I’m able to generate more ideas and keep sharing them until you’re completely happy. Taking smaller steps and getting your feedback from an early stage is crucial to making sure you get a website that fully meets your expectations.

Once a design direction is found I can then begin developing the page further. At this stage I can start planning page structure and plan a user journey through the page, crucial to determining the placement and order of content and buttons on the page.

The final homepage design when it went live. The two images below show views from two device widths. The website is built to adapt responsively for all screens/devices. The development for this project and my others is always completely bespoke conforming to the latest guidelines. No wasted code from pre-built themes or templates is loaded, causing site bloating and hindering search rankings.

New sites are notoriously difficult to rank well in searches. It’s therefore critical that you implement a degree of SEO maintenance in the first few weeks. Unfortunately a site that is created and put live will take a long time to rank if you don’t implement some sort of SEO strategy and match content to popular search terms.

A site that is built to perform in search rankings must be optimised to load quick enough for it not to be penalised. My primary goal as a web developer is to ensure that even the most content heavy pages load within 1.5 seconds over standard bandwidth. This is the single biggest factor to achieving a high Page Insight score from Google.

GOOGLE PAGE INSIGHT: 89/100
GT METRIX: 93/100

Most agencies rely on third-party hosting providers to manage and store the website files. This can be fine until an issue arises. If you have one point of contact for all your hosting needs then I can address any updates and maintenance as a priority when it’s needed. Who better to maintain the website than the person who built it. Almost all my clients host their website on one of my high-speed UK servers but it’s not compulsory. If you do decide to use my hosting service then you can access the following: