For our love of dogs, we knew how crucial it was for us to deliver a fresh, playful and energetic new look for Bristol Animal Rescue Centre (Bristol A.R.C) – a multi-faceted site with complex elements. This wonderful charity has been helping, healing and homing the city’s vulnerable animals since 1887, so were most deserving of our voluntary time donation*. More on this later.
The brief was to improve their online presence through beautiful and user-friendly design, ultimately encouraging the public to donate towards the care of vulnerable and neglected animals, or to perhaps even adopt. The site needed an exciting, youthful design direction to share their animals looking for homes, along with their regular events, campaigns and appeals.
When you arrive on the home page, an auto-play looped video immediately draws you to their mission. Across the website, we carefully created a strong range of visual hierarchy to consistently deliver the messages to donate or adopt. We consistently used media objects to give the pages a seamless, modern feel, along with a conscientious juxtaposition of text and images to create effective signposting.
Call to Action
The main call to action was widely visible, standing out as the simple ‘Donate’ button across the site. We worked with a leading donation plugin, GiveWP to avoid unnecessary custom coding. The coders behind this intuitive plugin are hugely supportive and easy to communicate with, having always taken on board our suggestions. They are connected to Stripe and Go Cardless payment gateways, both dynamic pop up boxes facilitating one-off or monthly donations.
Across the site are our signature media objects, sharing images of the dogs and cats looking for homes.
Gravity Forms
Modernising the enquiry forms was a huge step forward for the Bristol A.R.C. site. We decided to utilise Gravity Forms across the site in different places such as the pre-screening for an animal, where you begin your path to adoption. With a progress bar along the top and different questions along the way, the user is led to feel that their personal journey to rehoming has begun.
Gravity Forms are an excellent WordPress plugin that gives site editors control over their form fields, the ability to create new forms, as well as the ability to view all form submissions in the website’s CMS itself. They even have a brilliant reporting interface.
As these animal profile pages are arguably among the most important for the site, we wanted to ensure the user is encouraged to help the charity in another way should they not be able to adopt. The signposted button appears again to remind the user they are able to ‘donate’.
Brand Identity
As we mentioned in our article, Rebrand Risks, rebranding isn’t always the way forward. We love sticking to the roots of a brand. For Bristol A.R.C., simple, minor adjustments were made to maintain their identity and improve on what they already had. We were also committed to their mascots, a small cat, dog and rabbit, appearing in various places.
Streamlined colour palette
We streamlined Bristol A.R.C.’s colour palette, focusing on the primary colours that complemented our vision to maximise white space across the site; a significant improvement on what they had previously which was very busy and multi-coloured.
Minor adjustments to the visual brand identity created the clean, accessible and professional design we were looking to achieve, at the same time as allowing the strong brand imagery to take centre-stage without distraction.
Browse the animals
With functionality and user journey in mind, we created a custom post type to share the animals in their care. With plenty of filters, the page shares a likeness to an online shop; with this style of browsing being familiar to most users, we felt this to be the most natural viewing process for those looking to adopt.
The optional filters actively allow the user to narrow down the results, offering a more lively, intuitive and personal browsing experience. The system is both easy to navigate and fundamentally an aesthetic display of those looking for a home.
Practice what we preach
*As a business, we’re always thinking about how we can be better. We have always been ethically motivated, whether that’s reducing our carbon footprint or helping brands who are on a mission to do good. With this in mind, we decided to donate 50% of this project’s budget (around £10,000 of our time) to Bristol A.R.C.’s needs. This was a great opportunity to support a wonderful charity and to produce an energetic, fresh new look which you can see for yourself here.