National Energy Foundation - Website + Eco Hosting
National Energy Foundation - Website + Eco Hosting
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Website + Eco Hosting | Milton Keynes | Makilo
Milton Keynes has a long history of innovation concerning the environment, and since 1988 it’s been home to an organisation at the forefront of this – The National Energy Foundation. To this day, NEF remains dedicated to supporting the public in the quest for healthy and energy efficient homes.
The National Energy Foundation has a legacy; any update to the website needed to match the status and experience of the organisation
within the sector.
Project Outline:
NEF was struggling under the weight of an older website doing as much as it could in terms of information delivery. At the same time, the organisation needed to act reactively due to the volume of projects it was involved with. In addition, bloated infrastructure and complex page hierarchies made the site extremely slow, and by extension, the site operational effectiveness was impacting the companies goals.
The organisation’s business processes have also evolved. For example, much of the content related to affiliate projects, many of which had a separate web presence, was causing loops in the information available to visitors. The rebuild was an opportunity to bring the site up to date stylistically and establish efficiencies in the way users expected to engage with the organisations’ leadership.
The NEF team were looking for a way to streamline what this site offered, frame the organisation in a better light and move the visitors via current and previous projects to the sources of information they needed.
Whether to promote the various projects they’re engaged with or directly as a leadership organisation. NEF wanted to draw people down through the site with parallax to evidence their experience. A sense of kinetic energy reflective of the sector that could align with the ‘Red Dot’ of the branding was a key design strategy.
Solution:
With NEF, it was essential to understand the issues surrounding the old website outside of the unresponsive infrastructure before starting to design an overhaul. So we made it clear to stakeholders involved that to tackle the brief’s requirements, we’d want the design and development work to better harmonise with the day-to-day practices of NEF in a more proactive way.
We began, where we do most projects, in a collaborative phase of work based on the strategic needs of the website. How it can address the aims and aspirations of the organisation, and how both parties intended to have this ‘tool’ work for them in the future. With a recent change in focus for NEF, new hires, leadership and fresh projects on the horizon, we also held a ‘Brand Awareness’ workshop with staff members that allowed discussion and feedback, which helped generate a consensus for the approach we’d eventually work on further.
NEF’s position of authority emerged from this workshop, allowing us to focus on ways it might blend with the human-focused offering of its everyday activities. Confidence reflected in the style choices and tone of voice allowed use to amplify the existing elements of the visual identity, particularly the colour palette, into a much more dominant feature. Some consultation surrounding the brand guidelines in place also provided room to move away from the older typography towards something more approachable and ultimately more flexible for use in digital environments.
We also aimed to embody a sense of ‘energy’ with some of the animation choices used to draw visitors down through the web pages. Growth and movement effects becoming a stand-in for the sector NEF is involved in and deployed while referencing the existing logo glyph where possible to link the two. Nods that presented the organisation’s role as leaders also became a way to add personality to web pages. For example, the copy on the homepage – tying together elements by using the brand colour to switch the register of the headline between ‘your and our’.
