Project - Aquarius Charity
Jo from the full service creative agency Amplitude approached me asking if I could build a fresh website for a drugs, alcohol & gambling addiction support charity called Aquarius. Amplitude had been tasked with a brand refresh for the charity which included a revamp of their existing site.
Jo and her team provided me with a list of what would need to be delivered for the new site, and after going through the list together to make sure everything was covered I provided Jo with a quote and we scheduled site rebuild in.
With around 20 service types across 12 locations it was important that the management system was set up for ease of use by the staff at Aquarius. After some initial planning, this was achieved using custom post types and bi-directional relationships.
At the request of the end client I set up a colour scheme switcher for their services, based on the type of service. Now each service page can adopt a colour scheme from a list with a single click.
The site has a search page that helps users find the service or information that they need fast, based on a keyword search.
To help service users find the location that they need as quickly as possible we created an interactive map on the contact page. Integrating the Google Maps API users can input their address and the location list automatically sorts nearest to furthest.
To help website visitors feel welcomed and supported the designers at Amplitude incorporated lots of soft, curved and wavy shapes in to the design. This was fun to develop and a nice change to the standard box shapes that are used in most website designs.
Most pages across the site have a contact form to allow easy access for website visitors to get in touch with the charity, and each form required a dedicated email address to send the submission notifications. I made this easy to manage by adding a custom email field to page & post edit screens and connecting this to the forms with a custom code snippet.
The services provided by Aquarius are broadly categorised in to Adults, Young People & Training. With similar services for adults and young people it was important that the service links incorporated these top-level categories. This was achieved using some categories and a custom code snippet to handle to rewrite of the URLs.
This project enjoyed all of the standard features you’d expect from a site built by me – search engine optimisation, high accessibility standards, fluid responsiveness across all devices, custom functionality added with code snippets & built with user experience and maintainability at it’s heart.
Macky has done an incredible job bringing our website to life! Working with Macky has been a fantastic experience — he’s professional, responsive, and full of talent. We’re so proud of the end result and can’t wait to collaborate on future projects. Thank you again for your outstanding work, Macky!
