Scottish Book Trust approached us looking to upgrade their website. We overhauled their entire approach to content, user experience, visitor engagement, and delivered a site that seamlessly integrates with their new CRM system. The result was a true digital transformation for the team at SBT and their users.
Objectives
A large national charity, SBT delivers the largest, most recognisable reading, writing and listening programmes in Scotland. Their old website was creaking with the sheer volume of content and a site structure that was inward focussed and difficult to navigate. They needed a new online presence fit for a varied audience with varied requirements. With that in mind, our aim was to to create a website that:
- Provided a scalable content structure for hundreds of pages and articles
- Made accessing content quick, easy, and intuitive
- Integrated fully with their new back office CRM system
- Reintroduced Scottish Book Trust to the community and increased engagement
Digital brand evolution
Although our remit was not to rebrand SBT, by expanding upon their colour palette and introducing a new visual device that combines illustration with photography, we evolved their brand into a more modern, compelling, and approachable online experience.
Strategy
Our overall strategy revolved around three main strands: organising and prioritising SBT’s massive amount of content; designing a simple but accessible user experience; devising a compelling front end solution that would integrate fully with the new CRM system they were in the process of rolling out.
To support this strategy a huge amount of time was spent in the Planning phase of the project, during which we undertook several key activities:
- We organised focus groups with the SBT teams and their audiences to better understand their needs and desires
- We reviewed and prioritised their existing content, evaluating pages and articles against user metrics to help rate its value and effectiveness
- We went through a rigorous UX process to devise key user journeys and create a scalable Information Architecture
- We created interactive wireframes of our proposed solutions, prototypes that allowed us to quickly test user journeys and content hierarchies
Content, content, content
With thousands of pages and articles, the original site was bloated and inaccessible. Restructuring and repriotising this amount of content was a huge challenge, one that required a large amount of research and audience insight.
Implementation
Once we had a clear plan for progression, we concurrently tackled the design of the new site whilst developing the backend infrastructure to integrate with SuiteCRM, SBT’s new CRM.
Visually, we explored different approaches based on the existing brand guidelines to help entice the varied audiences. We wanted to convey a modern and approachable message that would appeal to parents, children, teachers, and writers, but without overly relying on either illustration or photography. The on-going production of such materials, along with the performance of the site, was on our minds. In the end, we introduced a strong new colour scheme that melded with photography to help both make the site visually appealing and make it easy for users to understand where they were at any one time.
Fully integrating the new site with SuiteCRM was a large part of the project delivery as it touched multiple aspects of both the user experience and the SBT’s backend office. We worked closely with the team at SalesAgility, the company implementing the CRM, to ensure a seamless transmission of data between the two systems, minimising SBT’s administrative burden at every opportunity.
Hidden depth
The simple structure and layout of the Scottish Book Trust website belies it’s hidden depth. A login area resides on the site that allows users to manage a multitude of applications, opportunities, events, books, author profiles, and prizes.
“We worked with Primate to overhaul the Scottish Book Trust website, looking to create a site that helped users find the content they needed quickly and easily. The process was detailed and the team really helped us understand what our users needed. The new website is fast, flexible and user friendly, and we’re delighted with it.”
Samantha MacKinnon
Digital Manager