Richmond Furniture Scheme (RFS) is a local charity that collects most types of new and used furniture, refurbishing or restoring them if need be, and then selling them to the public. It offers 'starter packs' containing common household goods or appliances for underprivileged individuals. It supports the community by offering volunteering opportunities, they also help to reduce furniture sent to landfill and promotes recycling.
In November 2023, I volunteered to deliver the refresh of RFS' website. I wanted to gain project experience with Wordpress and offer meaningful impact to a worthy cause and support the local community. I delivered on this project in August 2024.
The situation prior to my involvement
The current staff had a functioning Wordpress site and with it, they wanted to:
send users to the online furniture store;
funnel users to the donation / payment page;
direct readers to discounts or grant schemes to entice users to buy their furniture; and
encourage volunteers to join;
From discussions with their management and volunteer's opinions, it was apparent that the website was not easy to navigate intuitively - it wasn't easy to find what you were looking for.
There were however volunteers who had laid out the groundwork for the old website: content providers, digital comms / social media editors, systems administrator. This mean't that I didn't have to create a website from scratch, or setup different environments, server or database configuration.
The task to accomplish
I was told that the current site at the time didn't need a complete overhaul, rather a few pages for extra content and better signposting from the homepage to redirect users more easily. After navigating the site myself, it was clear that quite a lot had to be redeveloped so that the various end users could find what they were looking for. The main tasks were:
Improve the header navigation as the main way of signposting users to the information they wanted to know.
Maintain a consistent design without completely redesigning the branding, or the 'look and feel' of the organisation across the whole site.
Redesign the homepage with refreshed media assets, consistent design and signposting to the aims of the website. Only use the Wordpress plugins and features available already otherwise provide your own custom code snippets.
What actions did I implement?
For the main navigation, I convinced the management to give up their attachment to the old, single-tier menu links and adopt a multi-tiered approach due to the increased page content. The parent menu links would serve as the 'signs' for the different end-users, the 'nested' or child links would redirect that specific user to the relevant page. For example, if a user was looking to buy furniture but wanted to know what subsidies they were entitled to, it's more likely they would hover the parent nav link 'Supporting you', which would then reveal separate links to discounts, grants and a FAQ page.
Regarding the homepage redesign, I discussed the content strategy with other volunteers involved with the website project, and how to align with the management's requests and aims of the website. After much deliberation, we decided to reinforce the aims of the website (mentioned above) using a simple horizontal card component consisting of an image, heading, short description and button link. The use of strategic repeating calls-to-action helped to direct users to the end goals of the website on all relevant pages.
I used repetition of the organisation's branding colour palette to keep the design consistent and encouraged the charity to hire a volunteer photographer to take company specific photos. The old website contained stock images from third party sites and had sporadic use of its colour palette, creating a false impression and disjointed user experience.
I was given responsibility (after management review and approval) of the migration process from their staging to prod site. I created a checklist of the salient changes and worked through them in the evenings (assuming reduced traffic) using Elementor's import/export template feature (for posts) and Wordpress free Doubly plugin (for pages) which can duplicate whole pages between sites.
What was the result?
I was given a lot of appreciation from the charity for my contribution.
I compromised with those involved in the project: it was often that volunteer's and management's opinions and desires for the new website, did not align and this created friction. It ended up drawing out the process of tasks and ultimately, the delivery of this project.
I was patient and professional with less technical charity workers. Often they would propose copy or content layout changes for me to implement since they didn't know how to use Wordpress or its site builder UI. They would often change their mind or require multiple 'tweaks' which prolonged the delivery of the project.
I leveraged Elementor templates feature to create design-consistent sections or components which could be reused across the site. This is also sped up the page build process.
Where I couldn't find a frontend solution with Elementor's native features, I wrote my own CSS and JS or researched online for a solution.