New website design for Railway Children

Railway Children is an international charity dedicated to supporting vulnerable children who live alone and at risk on the streets, where they suffer abuse and exploitation. Railway Children have been a longstanding client for us here at Brace Digital. It was in fact 2017 when we began to support their existing Umbraco website. Since then we have been making incremental improvements to the website such as Umbraco upgrades, donation user journey enhancements, security improvements and redesigning their navigation.

Earlier this year, Railway Children approached us to discuss redesigning their website. Their brand had been updated, a Christmas fundraising campaign was upcoming and the website was in need of a lick of paint and greater flexibility for content editors. Here is what the website looked like before the project:

The first step of the project was to meet with Railway Children and discuss their requirements, objectives and also, importantly, discuss how we could deliver the project in time for their Christmas campaign. A project team was formed including members of Brace Digital and Railway Children and we decided the most effective way to make the biggest impact whilst keeping on budget and delivering on time would be to focus on redesigning a new header, footer, homepage, listing pages and a new flexible template with many flexible modules that could be reused throughout the website.

Once we all had all of our ducks in a row, we documented the deliverables for the project and set about producing wireframes for the new design. This allowed the team to agree on the structure of the required changes and gave the advantage or quick, iterative changes before the project progressed to the design phase.

Once the wireframes were signed off, we entered the design phase which involved creating designs based on the wireframes for both desktop and mobile for all of the new templates.

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The designs were then approved by Railway Children and our developers set about translating the pixels into code and implementing the functionality in Umbraco to allow for highly flexible and easy to populate content managed pages. Once the project had passed through Brace Digital's vigorous testing phase, the website was released to Railway Children for user acceptance and content population. In our experience, this was one of the most swiftest and organised content population phases that we've experience. So a huge well done to the Railway Children team for their support with that.

We, and most importantly, Railway Children are really happy with the end result which you can see for yourself here www.railwaychildren.org.uk. The project was delivered on time and on budget and is one that we're really proud of.