Wellways website redevelopment

Tundra and Wellways have been working together for three years, and in that time, we’ve created a number of campaign sites for them on Craft CMS. Their main site, however, remained on Drupal until an AWS upgrade presented the perfect opportunity to replatform wellways.org onto Craft CMS. We worked with Wellways to move their main web presence over to Craft, utilising the same instance that already housed their campaign pages.

Delivering value faster with a phased approach

To allow Wellways to realise the value of a new website quickly, we took a phased approach to development. Phase One was the MVP: a small content site featuring essential information only. This comprised a few core content pages, contact information, and CTAs. We also used this as an opportunity to introduce and test out some of the new visual elements included in the recent updates to Wellways’ brand guidelines. Implementing these design updates across this interim site allowed us to experiment with their application, as well as introducing the new look and feel to users in a gradual and low-impact manner.

Implementing new brand guidelines

The new updates to Wellways’ brand guidelines included a number of new graphic devices, which we used to create visual interest across the site. The new bubble graphic has been implemented in page headers and the homepage, and employs animation to bring liveliness and hopefulness to the design.

Wellways had also commissioned header art by a First Nations artist, which we featured in a wide screen, edge-to-edge banner to place maximum focus on the art. This banner was implemented as a flexible alternative to the standard image header component, such that any page could be easily adapted to include the First Nations banner with just the click of a button.

Focusing on accessibility

Wellways works with people from all walks of life, with all levels of ability. For this reason, accessibility was a core focus of the project. The site complies with WCAG 2.0 AA standards and utilises larger typefaces and high colour contrast to ensure maximum readability across all devices.

Extending functionality through continuous releases

Subsequent development phases have focused on the incremental rollout of additional features to the site experience. This included the introduction of a mega menu and site search powered by Algolia; a dedicated News section, complete with additional meta such as categories, tags, and post dates; a map feature to allow users to browse for services in their area; related content blocks to allow for deeper browsing; and video playlists complete with transcript options, to keep transcripts within the Wellways site experience.

Tackling new features in small increments across multiple releases allowed us to bring value to Wellways sooner, whilst ensuring that the user experience was not massively disrupted from week to week. These phased releases also allowed Wellways to prioritise their content entry and asset management around a defined schedule, aligning business activity and website updates to the same timeline.

The new site provides Wellways with an improved authoring experience through Craft CMS, and puts emphasis on the artwork and graphic devices included in Wellways’ new brand guidelines.