Bright Futures: website design for a UK social enterprise
As a website design studio in Devon, designing stunning websites for creatively-inclined businesses across the UK, we've just finished a website build for Bright Futures Unltd, which is a non-profit social enterprise that develops young people by offering holistic youth work provision.
The team is based down the road in the Burton on Trent area, and we have connected with their volunteers in Derby, so it was great to help out a local enterprise delivering great work in the community.
We built a customised website, based on the versatile Squarespace Bedford template with fonts and colours suited to the enterprise.
The Squarespace platform gives maximum control to the team to make edits, create content and update the site, without the need for minor edits by expensive developers. It also frees them up to focus on delivering their core services, rather than fiddling around with the website.
Here are some of the things we enjoyed about the project:
1. Finding images that match Bright Futures' look and feel
This is something that we never get tired of - finding fun and informative images that suit the organisation.
As Bright Futures delivers youth work solutions, we wanted to capture a youthful, fun and vibrant look.
It was great fun scouring Unsplash and Pexels for free-to-use, high resolution images that would fit with the text content Bright Futures provided us with.
Some of our favourites were the cheeky faces we found to illustrate the Ninja School and Anger Management courses!
Which do you like best?
2. In-person training session with the team
At the end of the project, we factored in some training time with the Bright Futures team.
Phil came over to spend some time with us in Derby, and we ran through the key elements for maintaining, updating and looking after the website.
This was time well spent on both sides, and an important learning point for us.
We based the training session on material developed by Squarespace for professionals in the Circle, which we are now part of.
However, I quickly realised that it was far too theoretical, working through a booklet, so we focussed on helping Phil learn how to edit the key areas on handover of the site.
This was definitely the way to go, and gave Phil the confidence to 'have a go' and get used to the way the back-end of the site works.
3. Clickable images that connect to an anchor link
On the frontpage of the Bright Futures website we included a grid block of images and programmes that the enterprise offers.
We then linked this to the main Programmes page using a nifty feature in Squarespace.
In order to direct the link to the correct part of the Programmes page on click through - rather than just the top - we utilised the anchor link feature in Squarespace.
This is a common feature on many websites and has been around for a long time, but worth knowing about.
The process is simple in Squarespace, and you can do this yourself using the help guide - in this instance we linked to a different page, rather than a section on the same page (you can see this in action in the Squarespace link to the article below).
4. Black and white gallery images
One feature in Squarespace that is extremely useful and powerful is the summary block.
This essentially gathers together content from elsewhere on the site in a specified block with a magazine layout. You can use it with images or, really handily, with blog content (more on that at a later date).
In this instance, we wanted to create a partners or 'who we've worked with' area, displaying the logos of the schools that Bright Futures has delivered sessions for.
Again, if you manage a Squarespace site, this is something that you can do very easily, following this help article.
Rather than pull in all the logos with their various branding, we used the handy image editor that is built into the gallery area to turn each image black and white.
The reason for this was to preserve the Bright Futures branding and give all the logos a coherent look when they were gathered together. Otherwise, they would have detracted from the page they were on.
5. First Facebook Live video interview
At the very end of the project and the training session with Phil, we had a bit of fun, and shot a quick Facebook Live video.
You can hear a bit more of a behind-the-scenes chat, as Simon talks with Phil, and crucially find out whether Phil has been to Ninja School himself!
While being a bit of a laugh, if you have enjoyed this post or found it informative, please do like us at The Apple Yard on Facebook.
If you want to get updates in your newsfeed too, make sure you like or comment on a couple of our posts on our page, otherwise Facebook's algorithms won't display posts immediately.
If you’d like to learn more from us on website design or get visual inspiration, follow @wildings.studio on Instagram or read more of our blogs on website design too.
