Overview

In mid 2008, we were approached by the Grasslands Trust, a conservation charity committed to protecting and restoring the ancient meadows and grasslands that are currently Britain’s most threatened habitat. With our decade of experience in targeting stakeholders, understanding and communicating real issues, and our commercially honed web design and strategic expertise, the Trust chose to partner with Keen to enhance their presence on the web.

The Challenge

The Trust came to Keen with an existing website, brimming with information on the topic of grasslands ecology and conservation efforts in progress. It was an admirable start to presenting the Trust’s work to its stakeholders and the media, but it suffered from a dated design, an unclear hierarchy of information, non-linear navigational journeys and a system architecture that made updates tedious. As a result, the site remained largely static, with few updatable features to draw return visits, and was not living up to its potential to become a powerful tool to engage the Trust’s stakeholders.

Keen saw its mission in three parts: first, to give the site a clear personality, matching that of its stakeholders; second, to maximize the user experience by adding features and intuitive navigational journeys; and finally, to build a system that would enable easy updates to keep the content fresh.

The Solution

Keen began by trying to define the best “personality” to fit the new site – one that would reflect that of its target stakeholders. Looking carefully at the content and the Trust’s previous work, our team developed three personalities, each with distinct design mood boards and editorial tones: the Naturalist, focusing on the beauty of the everyday; the Scientist, seeking information and statistics; and the Romantic, feeling a strong emotional connection to the destruction of natural beauty. Working with the Trust, our team combined elements from each to form the overall design identity for the site, not only emphasizing an optimism for the future, but also presenting the immediate need to recognize the challenges of the current conservation situation.

With a strong design direction, our web strategy team set out to maximize the user experience, developing clear, intuitive navigation and adding certain features to make the site more engaging. Keen created an illustrative photo gallery to take advantage of the Trust’s high-quality photography collection, a revolving news updates area for the homepage, an events board and an interactive glossary of terms. It also strengthened presence of the site’s call to action for donating or volunteering on a project. Meanwhile, our system developers custom-built a content management system that now allows the Trust staff to easily manage and update every aspect of the site, from photographs to text content to uploads, ensuring that the site is easily maintained and kept up to date.