The Design Brief

County Durham Sport is part of a network of 43 Active Partnerships across England. Funded by Sport England and supported by the Active Partnership Network, their role is to challenge inequalities and change lives through sport and physical activity.

We were asked to design and build a responsive website. With over 300 pages of content, the site needed to be fast-loading, easy to navigate, optimised for search-engines and simple to update in-house. In addition, the website also incorporated a high-level of interactive elements including bespoke built “interactive maps”and downloads. .

Our Solution: Responsive Web Design

County Durham Sport already had a website but the outdated coding, chaotic navigation system and empty pages made it almost impossible for site-visitors to find relevant information.

The first task was to create an organised structure that grouped relevant information together. This was achieved by using the charity’s key initiatives as titled sections of the website menu which linked to the main pages in the website. Sub-pages were added to each of the sections to further break the key content into accessible information. Colour-coded navigational “info” blocks at the bottom of each page provide a clear path to information and act as signposts to guide site-visitors through the website.

By redefining the page content, streamlining the navigation system and creating anchor links between relevant sections of the website, we were able to drastically reduce the number of pages across the site and provide a clear path to information for website visitors.

Working closely with the County Durham Sport team the entire content of the website was rewritten. Out-of-date information was removed, and all new content was optimised for search engines as part of the build. This included search-engine optimised text content, web optimisation and the reformatting of all of the photographs and galleries used throughout the website.

One of the most important requests from County Durham Sport concerned the incorporation of interactive elements throughout the website. These took the form of third-party i-frame information blocks, downloadable videos and worksheets, online questionnaires, contact forms and a series of interactive “hot-spot” maps which displayed information about local sports associations and initiatives when a spot on a map was hovered over.

As County Durham Sport needed to be able to add and update content on a regular basis, the website used a modular drag-and-drop front-end page builder as part of the build. Template pages were also created as a way of providing ready-made page layouts for future use. A series of highly detailed bespoke “How To’s” were created for the CDS team and to ensure that everyone was comfortable using the website we also delivered a WordPress workshop at their premises in Durham.