Seeing the potential in good design/website
We all have hobbies, one of mine just so happens to be pottery, once a week at the Ridgewood Community Centre I don a potters cap and make a mess. I nearly missed out though… When I first wanted to try pottery, my partner and I tried to find the class at the centre and failed epicly. Being completely new to the centre we simply couldn’t find enough information about it online to locate the studio.
Needless to say after more research we found it on our second attempt and have been going every week since. However this got me thinking, how many others go through a similar process and lose out? The Ridgewood Community Centre is a charity with no active funding so they were potentially losing out as well. It hosts a huge range of groups and activities (more than I previously thought!) and I had no idea.
You can see a preview of their old website here: https://web.archive.org/web/20180810195910/http://ridgewoodcommunitycentre.org.uk/
Identifying the requirements of the new website design
I eventually got talking to Anne-Marie who helps run the centre to find out more. It turns out the previous website had been hacked and so they were using a website created by a volunteer to keep them stay online.
Thankfully the old website worked to an extent. It had about the centre, a timetable and basic contact information for each group. What it didn’t have though was enough information about the individual groups and activities, it wasn’t responsive to mobile or tablets and wasn’t the fastest loading website in the world.