Strategy to 2035
Website for Bristol Zoological Society's strategic plan
- Role: digital designer
- Stakeholder: Bristol Zoological Society
- Sectors: charity (conservation and education)
- Deliverables: WordPress website and CMS training guide
Bristol Zoological Society published their new strategic plan in 2021 and needed a dedicated standalone website to share updates on the progress and invite feedback from the local community.
- Accessibility
- HTML & CSS
- Information architecture
- Prototyping
- Web design
- WordPress
The strategy included the proposed closure and sale of the Bristol Zoo site in order to invest into the development of the Society’s Wild Place Project site. The proposal evoked an emotionally charged public debate, locally and through national news, so sharing information about the proposal in a transparent, concise and accessible way was crucial.
Due to the content and purpose of the website, which focusses on surveys, development proposals, consultations, timelines and council planning decisions, the site needed to sit separate from the Society’s attraction websites, in look and feel as well as in content.
I wrote up a project plan, including deliverables from and to stakeholders, milestones, feedback and testing, before building a first draft sitemap based on the project brief as a base for a collaborative project team approach.
The challenge was to develop a structure that made the complex content easy to find and clearly differentiated between the three sites:
- • the current Bristol Zoo Gardens site (to be closed)
- • the current Wild Place Project site (to be kept open throughout)
- • and the ‚new zoo‘ (redevelopment of Wild Place Project to merge both collections)
Based on the original sitemap I built a clickable wireframe version (lo-fi prototype) which we used to review and amend the sitemap before I chose an accessible WordPress template, designed the site in line with the Society’s overall brand and structured the page hierarchy and navigation.
To make the site as accessible as possible I also recommended and implemented the inclusion of the complete strategy as webpages instead of only offering the content as a downloadable pdf.
After launch I wrote up a comprehensive CMS and controlled vocabulary guide for project handover to the internal PR team.
