Sussex Wildlife Trust has been protecting the county’s wildlife and wild places for more than 60 years. But with thousands of pages spanning nature reserves, species, conservation, events, education, campaigns, advice and fundraising, its website design had become almost as complicated as the ecosystems it was helping to protect.
We began with a comprehensive discovery programme, combining stakeholder workshops, surveys, user research, competitor analysis and our own UX review. What emerged, rather than a shortage of great content, was a problem with how people found and connected it. Navigation reflected internal teams rather than user needs, important services were buried and valuable stories too often ended without giving people a clear next step.
Heartbeat
We were presented with an opportunity to turn a huge repository of information into somewhere people could genuinely explore. So we rebuilt the experience around what people actually want to do, such as find somewhere wild to visit, identify wildlife, discover an event, understand the Trust’s work or find a way to help. The new structure creates clearer journeys between these needs rather than expecting visitors to understand how the organisation works behind the scenes. This user-first approach had been one of the clearest findings from discovery.
A new modular design system gives Sussex Wildlife Trust more freedom to tell stories through photography, editorial content, campaigns, species and the landscapes themselves. Search and filtering make a large content library easier to navigate, while the reserves experience combines listings and mapping to help people discover more than 25 places across Sussex.
Most importantly, content no longer lives in isolation. A reserve can lead you to the species that live there, the habitats that support them, something happening nearby or a way to get involved. Stories connect to action and action connects back to the bigger cause.
Impact
The result is a website that finally reflects the scale of Sussex Wildlife Trust’s work. It brings together over 10,000 species, 5,000 acres of protected and restored land, more than 25 public nature reserves, 38,000 members and over 1,000 volunteers within one joined-up digital experience.
It also gives the Trust a much more useful platform behind the scenes. The discovery process identified the need to move away from rigid pages and manual workarounds towards a modular, scalable system that staff could manage more effectively.
The new website makes the Trust’s expertise easier to find, its impact easier to understand and its calls to action much harder to miss. Whether someone arrives wanting a Sunday walk, advice about wildlife or a way to defend nature in Sussex, there is now a clearer route from curiosity to involvement.
