Girlguiding UK is the UK's largest voluntary organisation for girls and young women and provides a unique, girl-only space where members feel comfortable just being themselves. 9web won a competitive tender to deliver a new visual design for the Girlguiding UK website and members' area in Spring 2009.
Girlguiding UK has over half a million members, and all the adults involved are volunteers. Their input to the website redesign process was of critical importance and the project began with a period of consultation to find ways to improve the website and how to organise the content to make things easier to find.
Once these high level objectives were set, we came on board to work with the web team to help them identify the specific information goals of the distinct audience groups; organise their content and plan the user journeys through the public site, members' area and through to Girlguiding UK's many microsites.
The communications team at Girlguiding UK have done a lot of work to develop a strong brand identity through a consistent suite of printed materials, but none of this had been translated through to the web. We tackled this challenge with our iterative design process, working closely with the communications team and the volunteers at every step.
The end result is a modern, audience-centric website using strong focused messaging and engaging imagery to demonstrate the relevance of the organisation to the outside world. Participation is encouraged via compelling landing pages and information heavy areas of the site have a strong visual hierarchy to aid the user journey. The members' area creates a feeling of dynamism with strong visual signposting through to deep content.
Aimee Lingman, Digital Strategic ManagerI was very impressed with how quickly 9web understood our organisation, our requirements and our diverse target audiences. This enabled them to create a clean, fresh and user focused design that fully complements our information architecture.
Following on from the website redesign, we have been working with Girlguiding UK to develop a suite of microsites for their four Training and Activity Centres. These use the core design as a foundation giving the microsites some much needed consistency with the main website, but have content specific to each centre. The four Training and Activity Centres are: Blackland Farm, Foxlease, ICANDO and Waddow Hall.
We have also designed one further microsite for the Girls' Attitudes survey - Girlguiding UK's comprehensive study of the views and opinions of girls aged 7-21 across the UK. The survey questioned girls from across the United Kingdom on their attitudes towards key social, political and economic issues.
This project revealed some insightful data on family and relationships; society, culture and community; health and wellbeing; education, training, skills and careers and the environment, and our challenge was to organise and display the data into a visually interesting way and provide a platform for all girls' voices to be heard. Visit the Girls' Attitudes survey website »
