Cranborne Chase AONB

Project

WordPress Theme

Background

Cranborne Chase AONB is one of the England’s 34 Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The organisation’s objective is to promote conservation and to value and secure the natural beauty of the countryside.

Brief

The AONB’s communications and marketing team wanted a new website to match the brand identity created at the start of 2020. It had to be easy for different members of staff to upload and edit a wide range of content types, from documents to galleries to news and events. Also, the website had to solve the problem of highlighting the AONB’s current projects and events while also making it easy for the public to find out about its long running campaigns and navigate its archive of documents and plans.

Solution

We used WordPress as the website’s back end content management system and built an entirely custom theme to deliver the goals of the brief. The team are finding WordPress easy to use and are adding new content at a considerable rate (including thoughtful and elegant long-form blog content).

By building our own custom theme from scratch we were able to solve problems most WordPress themes would struggle with, such as two separate types of Posts, two separate Meet-The-Team areas, promoting the five brand colours, context aware sidebars, and some specific and complex mapping requirements.

We migrated approximately 300 pages from the old content management system, including dozens of excursions, walks and cycle routes, all carefully mapped. The team can also easily map their own routes (e.g. on Strava) and upload them to expand the range of suggested routes in the AONB area.

We added Facebook and Instagram integration. Facebook is important for the AONB in reaching a large public audience and Instagram is the ideal channel to promote the beauty and variety of the Cranborne Chase. For Instagram we used the Intagrate plugin with help from Bournemouth based developer Iain Poulson.

Lastly we ensured the AONB website complied with new rules on accessibility for public sector websites which came into force in September 2020.

Client Feedback

“They created a very attractive new WordPress website for Cranborne Chase AONB – understood our brief, provided great training for the team and nothing was too much trouble.”

Mel Capper, Communications Officer

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