Chat with NB - Daniella Donaghy and Chris Rushbrooke
12:06PM Jun 18, 2024
Speakers:
Chris Rushbrooke
Keywords:
website
jobs
charity
site
terms
branding
people
bit
good
accessibility
logo
process
emails
rebrand
colors
built
page
structure
wordpress
work
Yes, I'm good. Thank you. How are you?
I'm alright. So I'm alright. You okay with me recording? It's just so everything I've ever said, and then all of a sudden I'm trying to remember what we talked about in three weeks, and no one knows. Yeah,
no, that's fine. My colleague, Stephen is also going to join us. He's our IT manager, so he might be able to add value. From a technical perspective. He's just running a few minutes late, but he's happy for us to start.
Yeah, cool. No worries. No worries. Well, thank you for sharing the brief, and that was very helpful. I wasn't, I wasn't necessarily expecting to fill it in for this. So it's really it's really helpful to be able to see your thoughts and processes and how you've sort of got to where you are. Do you, I mean, are you happy to just sort of take me through just verbally roughly where you are? That normally brings out some extra little nuggets of information and stuff in terms of how you've got to where you are, what the process is, dreams, aspirations, thoughts, that kind of stuff.
Yeah, of course. So I've been within the organization for two years now, and when I started, we had a different CEO who had been as part of the services for a number of years, and it was a very different the management was very different back then. So a kind of any kind of idea of a new website or anything like that, was kind of put on the back burner. Yeah. So since we found a new CEO a few months ago, she's very supportive of Buzz cutting a new website. You know? She values the importance of it, because, as you can see from our existing one, it is horrendous.
It needs some love. Yeah,
yeah, absolutely. And, and in addition to that, we are going to be undergoing a rebrand and some other changes that will be set to happen next year on the first of April 2025 so that's kind of the that's our launch date for everything, ideally. So I'm hoping that gives us plenty of time to work on the website, make sure it's perfect for that. And really, you know, we we want something that's going to be more reflective of who we are as an organization. Because for a while now, we have kind of been in the dark ages in terms of digitization technology. So we're kind of slowly getting there where we're becoming more of a modern, forward thinking organization, and we want on rebrand and the website to reflect that, yeah. So hopefully that gives you a bit of background into kind of why we're doing it, and in terms of what we want from the website. We just, we just, there's going to be a lot, there's going to be a lot of changes, and I think we kind of just want to start from scratch with it, because a lot of the information that we have on the existing website is very gated. There's people that contact us about a certain page which I didn't even know existed. And in all honesty, I've just kind of neglected the website, because when I came in two years ago, it hadn't been updated in a number of years, because I kind of restarted the marketing department. We didn't have one for a few years, and I've just kind of looked at him for, you know, what I'm not even going to do with that. So I just kind of want to start from scratch, and then, you know, work our way up and and I think we know we've got a lot of potential here, and we just want to make sure we get it right. Yeah,
yeah, that makes sense. And I'm alright thinking, I think you mentioned in the LinkedIn message that the branding is underway,
yeah. So we've, we've kind of, I mean, I developed the logo and branding two years ago because we were always, we were always going to have a rebrand, but our previous year was just kind of like, oh, we'll stick the new logo on the website. And I'm like, No. And so I'm pretty certain the logos finalized. We're pretty happy with that. And then the we might be some slight changes to the font or the colors, but I'm pretty certain there's not going to be anything major. Join me to show you quickly what the branding is like. Just so engage, I promise it's an improvement to what we have.
Yeah. I mean, no one. Everyone likes coat of arms.
Yeah, it reminds you of like a school, but, yeah, our branding is, like, over 100 years old. We're an old organization, so there's been, there's loads of changes that kind of happening, right? So if I share, hang on, bear with me. Share. Oh, it says I'm disabled.
Should you should be you just beat me. Hopefully it's there now. Oh, yeah,
top two, right? That might work. Oh, hang on, I need to just go in the setting. Bear with me.
Yeah, no, it's always the way
it's saying quit and reopen. Okay, give me one question. I'm Just gonna quit and reopen. I
I'll try
Okay, so let me just show now, right? That should work now. Can you see that Steve has just joined us on.
Just, sorry, I'm just showing Chris the brand guidelines, so he's got a bit of an idea with the rebrand, which will help with the website. So this is kind of, let me just scroll and ignore the bottom logos. We're not going to go ahead with that. But if I go to like this page, maybe, and then ignore the right hand logos, because they need to go. This is kind of the way that the direction we go in. So we just want something more colorful, a bit more friendlier, because obviously it's complete opposite of what we've got now, and something vibrant and, you know, like the rounded fonts is kind of like, you know, saying that we're friendly and approachable and like, they're kind of like the color schemes we're working with, but they might be tweaked ever so slightly, but We still want to remain colorful. We still want, you know, like, I hope that kind of gives you a bit more of an idea. Yeah, that's,
did you say you've done em?
Yeah, I hate logo design.
It's great.
It was the best I could do.
I think it's ace. Thank you. The colors are great. I think we do anyway, standard, but might be worth doing now for you is just to run everything through accessibility checkers, if you have an opportunity, just so you can see which of those colors come from a combination point of view will work from accessibility point of view, just as a starting point if you're potentially tweaking those colors, yeah, what you might find is just small tweaks will just mean that a color can be used more widely. It's almost always anything Yellow and White doesn't go together because the contrast is never high enough. But then, you know the blues. It might be that if you just darken at a shade, it will work with white and with black. Or it might be you can use the colors, different colors together. So if we can do it, we won't charge anything, but we can just run that through. If you share, if you can share that document with me, we can just run through those, run those colors through it. It's just a program, like, it's not a 10 day job or anything. It'll take us an hour or so. Or we can run it through, and then we can just share back with you what passes and what fails and potential tweaks we could recommend that might just give you a bit more flexibility, so you don't get to a point where you can't use so many of the colors together that you don't quite get that vibrant feel that you're going for because you become restricted with what you can use, especially on digital it's not as bad in print, but especially with digital stuff. So yeah, if you share it with us, we can, we can do that and just share a document with you. Here's some recommendations. Yeah, thank you.
No problem.
You remember where we're to talk about the new logo and the stage that that brand is at. So at the moment, you've got the guidelines, and then part of the process of this will be, then, obviously, to take the guidelines and develop them through into the website and how it looks and feels.
Yeah, and we haven't really got anything beyond the guidelines. At the moment, we are kind of the social media posts and any internal communications, we are kind of using that font and color scheme just because there's only so much we can do with navy blue, sky, blue, white. So we are kind of using the branding already, but we've not, kind of developed a personality as such, like we so we've it really. We've got a lot of freedom with the website design. We're quite open to ideas and how it looks, you know, as long as it navigationable, like we know, we want to be able to easily navigate around it. We want it to look good, look fresh, you know, but anything's an improvement to what we've got to be fair. So yeah,
this might cross both of you, but from a platform point of view, are you happy to remain with WordPress?
Stephen, that's the flexibility supporters out there, the plugins, yeah, having that easiest way to go. I mean, are there any other options that people use these days that are popular? Chris, yeah.
I mean, there are, there are options. They are we. We mainly use WordPress. We've used Webflow, we've used things called framer. So we've used a couple of alternatives, and they're great, like they The reality is, most website builders will do the same functionality, though they're relatively user friendly. So if you said, right, we want to, we desperately want to use this platform. That wouldn't necessarily be a problem. We favor WordPress just because, like you say, it's so flexible, it's so well known. There's always whatever functionality comes out. We have a new program, new stuff. Somebody will create something that allows you to add that to WordPress, and from a charity point of view, we just find it gives you real flexibility. You don't know what's coming. Quite often you are relaunching a website because the current one doesn't work, is out of date, hasn't been supported, like the person who's got the Logins left four years ago, whatever it might be. So you normally are starting at a certain point of we just want to get a really nice website that does what we want. But then, if you're talking about potential digitization, and you don't know necessarily where that journey is going to go, I feel like you know, apps, portals, logins, everything you might want, WordPress will be able to support so I wouldn't, I wouldn't push you to move away from WordPress, unless there's a particular reason for it. But, yeah, it's just a, there's, there are a lot of options now, and quite often people are just like, we want it to fulfill an XYZ, yeah. So it's just making sure that we're the right, you know, we've got the right expertise and knowledge to be able to support you with that, which is, you know, WordPress is our our happy space and our comfortable space. But if you have to keep it now, we won't be pushing you away
from it. Yeah, I certainly would be, as I say, in terms of integrations into other APIs, the best way
to go from from integration. So you mentioned, recite me, we normally use accessibe. They're sort of, again, same sort of potato, potato type thing. They all taking your website and just adapting it to individuals needs to make it easier for them to use. Do
you is there an extra cost involved with those integrations? And it's something quite new to me
from a from a settle point of view, not really like it is. The cost will be included within the build of the site. But adding accessibility, for argument's sake, is more of a process of connecting a few buttons and starting a few things like that takes an hour. Most, most of them have a monthly cost. We, we use accessibility, which I think is $40 or $40 or 40 pounds a month, which is we, we can charge you that through our maintenance, or you can pay that direct to them. But we don't mark that. We don't mark that up. It's just a cost. I don't know what. I don't know what this site means. To be honest, we've used accessibility for all our sites, but I imagine they will have a monthly cost that you'll have to pay, regardless of which one of those. But the Yeah, the setup cost is sort of is nominal within the build part of the process.
Yeah, no, that's fine. I just Yeah. It's something that I kind of quickly found yesterday. Obviously, I'm not precious about that particular one, and if you've had any other options, and that's absolutely fine,
yeah. Again, I think they are similar to, similar to the CMS, platforms like WordPress and the alternatives. It's quite often just they'll all do a similar job recite me does my head in, because when you turn on the voice recognition thing, it just starts talking at you really loud. But yeah, so if you haven't got a person like we use accessibility, we find it really good try and set things up from a usability I can accessibility, point of view structurally correctly anyway, so that, yeah, the basics are done. But what accessibe and all the other versions of that do is ensure that the site remains compliant, to double a standard as standard, so even if you've even if you're not managing the accessibility things in the back end, because it can be a bit technical and a bit time consuming. So if you don't have someone doing it all the time, there will be things that are missed, and these the platforms, accessibe, in particular, sort of has your back, basically, so it applies that at the point of loading, so that a user will have all of the accessibility needs met, even if you haven't done it from the back end point of view. But, yeah, they're much homogeneous in lots of ways,
things like read it like text to speech. We have read speaker on the website at the moment. I'm not sure it works too well or at all the moment, it did work at one point
with the rest of the website. Stephen
C text to speech. Text Size. You can have sort of focus bars to help people go through them. Color contrast of making it more vibrant, less vibrant, what for whatever people's specific needs are. So it ticks all of those things. And it's the reason we use it is that it's, it's actually an American is built for the American audience, because in America, the WCAG guidelines are law. So if your site isn't compliant, you can be sued, which we know Americans absolutely love to do in the UK, it's not, it's not a law, yet. It's guidance. I think I we believe that as charities, government organizations, there's a there's an obligation. And I don't need to tell you guys that, given the audience, you work with them, both officials, you have, but we encourage strongly all of our clients to have some sort of tool on there that AIDS people to adapt to the site to their needs. But yeah, so we use it because in America, it's good enough to stop lawsuits. Therefore we feel like it, it does the job as best as it can. Are there any other so from a functionality point of view, the careers page, I don't I think probably will, will be more of a I'm imagining will be more of you want to be able to post jobs, potentially have some sort of a contact form, that kind of thing. Or is, do you want a bit more of a hub and a bit more functionality in that
I'm quite flexible, really. What do you think? Stephen, well,
I was gonna say about the careers place actually, because we do have this product with ITRE sort of HR payrolls platform, and that has sort of careers, jobs bit built into it. People can apply jobs through itrend. So we need to discuss that internally and actually have a sit down and talk a lot about the job section within ITRE and see how if we're going to use that, or we're going to build a separate career site, yeah, just sit down by recruitment team as well to have a look at that, because that can sort of manage applications. So we can list our jobs on itrent, the whole it manage the whole process. So when people apply into itrent, it captures their details, and when they made an employee, it's already got everything there has onboarding built in, like an onboarding port, where they can log into and submit the bank details or whatever else within the system. So it depends, I think we'd have to have that really I think that's something we should probably look at as soon as possible. Daniella to say, Now, that's a big part of any website, isn't it? Definitely as well, we need to have a look date that does that bit our needs. And whether it's just a link within the website to that HR quarter or a separate build system. So that's something,
I mean, I don't know that there's, there's so many of these things. I don't know that one particular quite often it will be possible that we can potentially use the data from there to populate stuff on the website. So we might be able to have a nicely formatted Jobs page that pulls the information through from your HR platform. But then if someone clicks Submit, it takes them out so they can they can fill in the form within the platform and keep that things together. Yeah, that that's we would normally go through that anyway as part of the scoping, just to make sure that we understand all the different Is there anything? Is there anything? Do you have a CRM platform, or any kind of other stuff where you're managing data and that kind of stuff, or even emails, that kind of stuff,
we've got into that moment is care control, which is system, but that sits outside to care control login, so staff who on our side can get to that. And the same with self service thing for pay slips and stuff like that, and booking holidays, which would be good to have a link to, but that, again, that's just a link, and it's something we're gonna have to think about as well in terms of having a look at it and see how customized, customizable it is, because, apart from changing colors and maybe a background picture In the logo. Don't do that much of it kind
of match the website.
Yeah. So we managed to have a look and see what we can do, because if we do use outreach the jobs portal, we might be limited in terms of making it look like the website, making the same background color in a logo. Sit down, have a look and see what we can do. About 2040, and see what we can do. Look for something built into the website for managing applications. So
what? What other suggestions would you recommend for any Chris, if kind of itrent doesn't work? What? What do you tend to see the most beneficial people using
jobs manager at the moment, I think that's the club and we've got, at the moment, I say WP jobs manager, yeah,
yeah. I think again. And this sounds like I'm on the fence, but I can't tell you how many we've we've built so many charity websites. Everyone uses a different even the donation platform, if you think it would be, we'd have a common like, we've used this one loads, and it works really well. But I think every single charity we've built a website for has used a different CRM, a different donation platform. Not many, to be fair, not many, have got HR platforms. So we did a big we did do a big HR integrate integration with the jobs board for a recruitment company, and they used something called idibu, Id Ibu, and I think that has lots of integrations with indeed and the job platforms. And that was relatively painless. But I think what we normally would do, if you're not sure what you want to use, is we, as part of this sort of scoping, we would go through what your requirements are from a this is what. This is our wish list. We'd like it to do all of these different things, and we'll go out and find solutions for you, and we try and find you like this ticks every box, but it's going to cost you 27,000 pounds, and 1000 pounds a month. This one ticks most of the old key requirements, and it's 400 pounds a month, and this one is free, but these are your restrictions, so we try and give you some options so that you've got a bit of a combination of flexibility versus budgets and functionality versus budget. Sorry. So, yeah, I feel like I'm copping out a bit, but I don't, I don't have a favorite HR one at this point. I don't think we've used enough of them.
No, that's fine. I think, yeah, we're, we're at that safer kind of happy to you know, we're open to ideas and suggestions. But I definitely think it'll be good for Stephen and I to have a chat internally about, you know, itrent and what other options are, there are available. And we do have a dedicated recruitment team internally as well, so it'd be good to have for us to have a chat with them and see exactly how much they want from it.
I imagine they'll have a lot. You want to change this. I think we've
patience. Just paste the chat recruitment thing as I say, it's not our ITN recruitment is not live, but this is another company, or it's a council actually uses the iTunes recruitment service. You can see a little bit about say it's not that customized Well, apart from maybe the background, a bit
like intend, if you've used, ever used intent, or anything like that, they have really similar
so if you click, so from that yeah, page, if you click first job, you can see, so we can sort have our sort of recruitment, sort of application through how well we can integrate into the website. Different might be the best actually to do. Again, we'll have to discuss that as well see how they want to use it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. I think one of one of our clients has got as I think they've used an improvement portal to create a web like a volunteer portal, so I might be able to ask them who they've used and what they've sort of found, I think UK, maths trust, so that they might be able to give us a steer on something, how that's worked for them. I think you've flagged in your brief as well. Already, Daniel, the the big thing will be content. So almost every website we do, the big delay is always content. I think you've you've said you need a good couple of months. The way we try and support with that is so through the process, we obviously, we'd work with you on creating a site map, which would obviously start with your content requirements here, sort of news and blogs, like all the different pages you want. We would encourage you to do sort of research and workshops with your audiences, if possible. I don't know how accessible they are to you, just to understand how they use the website and what they use it for, and what they would like to be able to do on the site. And we go through a process of discussing internally with you your requirements, your audiences, and what they want and need if you've got it, which you may not. We might be able to review analytics of the current site, but from what you said, that might not be helpful if the new site isn't, isn't doing what you want it to at the moment. I
mean, we do get quite a lot of traffic to our website, but most of it is through jobs, and we do see I went on maternity leave last July, and around that time, it was the change in Google Analytics. It changed to what was it called now, Google, yeah, so I don't know if we actually activated that, but I've not actually looked into it, because it just changed around the time I went on maternity, and I've only been back about six weeks. So so we do have, we've got Google search console as well. But again, we don't really do more. It will,
it will help, because we can, we can just take information from it and see what pages are being used what you know, the search console will help us, from an SEO point of view, making sure that the keywords you're currently sort of scoring well for we try and retain those. We'll take you through the process of, sort of creating your new site structure and what you want to go on there, then the UX phase will be sort of creating the structure of every page and what content is going to be on there. And we will then use that to create your content template, which sort of guide you through page by page. We need a title, body copy, how many words? Just so if you are doing that job of rewriting all the copy, we'll try and guide you through that and give you a bit of a template to work from, so you're not just trying to go at it from a sort of like almost blindly, which you would be doing that. So that's built into the process that we have. And if we know that realistically, you're going to need two months, we can just build that into the timelines so that we're not it's better to have it there and know that that's come, then say it's gonna be three weeks and it takes six and kicks everything out of line.
Anything good? I think, from my side, I'm sure you'll have questions that that's most it's the budget looks fine, timelines more than fine. And yeah, there's every everything else sort of makes sense. Have you got what what questions and stuff do you want to know from us?
First of all, I tried to get onto your website. May have been last week, and it wouldn't let me. I don't know if there was an issue with your website at the time or not, because I wanted to kind of look at some examples of your work, or if you've got anything that you can kind of send to us, just so we can kind of see some case studies.
No. I mean, is it working there? Yeah, yeah. I'm not aware of it. Okay,
yeah. I think it was around the time I messaged you, and I was like, Oh, I can't get on it, but if it's working there, that's absolutely
fine. It's there.
Brilliant, okay, great.
As as with all cobblers whose shoes are broken, our website needs updating. In fact, we're actually planning on launching a new website in the next two or three weeks. So we've got, we've got loads more than that to share, but I'll stop sharing. I just need to show you what does exist. Yeah. Well, yeah. Well, I mean, we've, we can share loads of stuff with what we've done. We've got, think, I don't know, maybe 20 plus charity websites now. We're currently working with SOS Children's villagers, who are global aid charity, Barefoot College, who are also, this happens all the time, really randomly, are also a global aid charity, but they they focus on helping women. They train women to manage and maintain solar farms, which is
really very niche, but brilliant,
exciting. It's very niche, but they do some great work, especially in sort of Africa and that kind of area the world. Also working with fair by design, who are a social impact, a social change organization, trying to meet your website at the bright side, poverty.
Bright Side, is it? Yeah. Bright Side, yeah. Bright
Side. So they, they were another one where we randomly ended up working with two mentoring charities at exactly the same time. So bright side, and envision, so we still, and we still work with both of them. We sort of manage and maintain the sites. But now I can, I can just send you. What do you obviously, we'll create a proper proposal. Oh, yeah, of course, we'll do, I can just share you a list of five or six websites that you can look at that we've, we've built, and then, yeah, we've got five or six that are sort of in progress at the moment, launching anywhere between this week and probably early January, February next year in terms of the process? No,
that sounds great. And what about the design process? How does that work? In terms of how it looks
from your way we could, we were creative agencies, so we, we our sort of core things are branding, websites, general design and sort of campaigns on social media. So we've got a design like we design team. We do brands for you guys, especially with a brand that's not that's sort of relatively infant and not quite set, is we would probably work with you to try and develop that and enhance it. So we would probably look at two or three home pages. So when it gets to the home page, what I think would be really good to do is probably have a bit of a brand workshop with you. Or else might be involved in that, just to go through the brand and interrogate the, you know, the values, the mission and vision, that kind of stuff. Just understand more about exactly who you are, what you want to be, how you want to be perceived, and try and help you to develop that brand as part of the process. And then when, when it gets to UI phase, so the sort of overlaying the design onto the structure, we would look to share different options, because you can, obviously, there's loads. It's amazing how different a website can look within the same brand, structure and hierarchy, just from looking at it in different so it could be the image led, it could be color LED. We could use colors as signposting. Or it could be, you know, there are lots of different ways we can we can chop it up. So we would then probably look to push those three things. So one would probably like, this is exactly what Daniella said. She wants it to be. She wants it to be this. And then option two might be, here's a bit of a push on and a bit of a development. And then option three might be a bit of a curveball, of like, let's just pretend we've never spoken to Daniella and the rest of the team, and here's how we could potentially do that to make it really different. So we try and give you a bit of a you'll normally end up somewhere between one and two. That's normally where we go. But then you might like certain options of three that we can pull in to just add a bit of something different. But it's a Gen, it's a, it's a, it's a process that would go so we'd set that home page. Once you're happy with the home page styling, we would then roll that out across the top level pages. And by that we mean what you would see in a normal nav bar. So the menu options, if you click some we class those as top level pages. So we roll that onto top level pages, which you'd sign off, and then when you have with that, we'd roll it out across the whole site. So we do, we do, do UI design for pretty much every page. So you will sign off every page before it's built through that process. There might be a couple of pages, like third or fourth level pages, that we don't do because they follow a structure?
Yeah. No, that makes sense. And I know you touched on branding as one of your specialties. Is there anything else that you offer in terms of branding that might be helpful? But maybe you know, aside from the website, just because you know, like I said before, our branding is quite infant, like there's not really much going on with it. So is there anything else that you can, additional, that you can offer? Yeah, definitely.
I mean, we, we can, I think, I think that for starting point, the low, I wouldn't touch the logo or the, you know, other than, like said earlier, about from an accessibility point of view, I think we've done far as really nice. I think if you don't have the foundational stuff, or if it's not been reviewed for a long time, in terms of that mission, in your statements and tools of the brand, it would be good to just review them so we can
sorry you are breaking up a little bit. I don't know if it's me or if you're breaking up for you. Yeah, breaking
up for me as well. Chris, a little bit comes back, frozen, please.
We know
back. I can hear you. I hear
you frozen then,
yeah, you kind of like breaking a little bit when you're speaking, but we'll see how we get on. But yeah, I think definitely we do want to kind of revisit our vision, our mission statements, etc. Because I think although the majority will kind of remain the same, like in terms of our E fast and, you know, like, nothing's changed in terms of the services that we offer, but I think obviously it just needs relooked at, needs modernizing. A lot of it that's probably a bit more reflective of the changes that are happening and will continue to happen. So I think definitely that could be an option to work together on that absolutely
and then from a design point of
law, sorry, Chris, half a word,
potential role, nice quote. I've never let me see.
Yeah, we all turn up. Won't make difference.
I'm still ahead.
Is that any better? I've just switched
to that seems okay, not breaking up just yet.
No, okay, I'll try it so, but we could if, if he's not talking, just put your hand up the So, yeah, from from a visual point of view, if you do want to explore the brand and interrogate that a bit more and look at how we could start to activate that. We could do that earlier in the process. So rather than waiting till we get to the homepage, UI stuff, instead of that, we could say, right, okay, we'll do a brand review and explore how the band could come to life. And not just look at it from a web point of view. We could look at it more in the way that we would a branding project, in terms of, right? This is the these are the logo, the colors, and how do we then activate that as a creative identity? So we could, we could add that as well. I don't want to feel like I'm trying to push loads of stuff on you, but I think you know, we would do, and it really helps. It does help the process quite often, where we do a rebrand first, because those ideas are being formed much earlier in the process. And when we do, if we do in workshops, Emily, who sort of leads our creative things, she likes to attend the workshops just to hear, hear what's being said, because there are often just little nuggets, little nuggets of information that just stick with her, that might just help her with a visual cue, or some sort of, you know, an image treatment or understanding, especially when, if we can do a session with sort of the users at the end, so your beneficiaries, those guys normally pull out some of the most interesting and relevant information and how the organization helps them and makes them feel, and, you know, the real impact side of things, that really helps. So it's great when we can get bring that through. So we're doing some work with a company called the National Development team for inclusion. We're trying to change their name, but they we did a session with their with their sort of service users, and it was the most all of the creative stuff that's going to be used has come from them. They talked about being a bridge and a spider's web and all this, the sort of language they use is so different to what we would use and use, necessarily, as a professional within the industry, they just look at it from a completely different point of view, and that really helps to then look at how we bring that language through.
Yeah, no, that sounds good, because we actually, we have, like an advocacy group within our services where we've got a group of service users that are, like the self advocates for the organization. So they would be brilliant for that, like a workshop with them. But yeah, I definitely think this could certainly be an option if you if you don't mind adding it as an additional and then we can kind of review everything and see what works for us. It just because I'm only saying this, just because we still don't have a proper identity yet, it's still very much the foundations of the brand. So I think, and I'm, you know, I'm a generalist marketer, and I've kind of been involved in graphic design and logo design and branding, and there's a lot going on. I'm not the expert in branding, and so I think having that extra support would definitely be valuable to us. So what,
what I'll do is alongside the accessibility stuff, because Emily will do that, is I'll ask Emily to just maybe just write down some thoughts, just into like, it won't be any anything, particularly in depth, in terms of, like, the work, she probably won't do any creative work. But I think if she just thoughts on the brand ideas she's had, of where she might take it, and even just things like, even if there are just questions that she has, like, what she'll instantly say to me, have they got their own imagery? That's always lots of websites live and die in imagery. Imagery is so important, but knowing that it's not there sometimes means, well, actually, perhaps we need to look at a more illustrative approach if we don't have the images, if we can have imagery, rather than using stock imagery, which can kill things very quickly, do a way of trying to visualize things in a different way. So, yeah, I'll get to what. We'll treat that sort of separately and like. So can give you a second question. Also, just ask Emily to just have a bit of a review of where you are. And if social media is maybe the best place to look at how you're currently using it as well, we might be able to look at that and just see how visually you're bringing it to life at the moment, even though it's just that one sort of relatively restricted channel,
I can say, near the brand guidelines as well. I'll just tweak it slightly with some of the changes we're making, but yeah, feel free to use that and utilize that as well. Perfect. I'm trying to think, if there's any questions, do you have any questions, Steve, because I'm mindful we've got another call at one and
yeah, sorry. Don't think in terms of hosting. Are we each with our own hosting? Use Google Cloud at the moment. Use that, or are we sort of fixed into a hosting plan with yourself?
No, we're pretty flexible. We we use, currently using SiteGround, we're, we're considering changing to Crystal, which, if you do choose to carry on your own, hosting is well worth the look at, because they do a really, I think I do. It is eight. I can't remember how much it is, but they offer a much cheaper rate for charities as well. They're a big pop and they use all green energy and things. So I'm, I'm looking at changing our hosting to them, but it's just fine making sure they do what we do. But yeah, so you're, you're welcome to use your own hosting. We'll, we'll just build the site into that. That's not a problem. But we do offer hosting if you want it. It's not okay. We're not We're not bothered. Okay,
okay, as a charity, we've got your credits as well. That might be an option as well. Yeah,
yeah, that's fine, yeah. Well, we can again. We can review that as part of the process, and you can decide which, what your approach is. Our general approach is, it's your website. You You're you own it, you control it, you decide what you do with it, and then we we look after it for you, as long as you want us to. In
terms of email, with some forms and stuff like that, we use our own sort of SMTP. We use Google workspace, so we use our own SMTP service and stuff like that, because that was a problem with the old website. The website had been set up with the company who developed it SMTP settings, and eventually they stopped working, and we weren't getting any emails, and we found out why. Yeah,
that makes sense. Yeah, we wouldn't want to change any of that. Most of the all you normally change now is the, sorry, to get technical, the a record, so in the a record, everything else then just stays the same, and it doesn't affect your emails and security set and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, we can, we can fit within what you've got. That's not
a problem. Just, I just, I always say, is a bit of a problem on our current website is the we've got, like the staff structures on there, which is good in a way, but it's bad in a way, because it lets everyone know our staff structure. We get so many sort of phishing emails where I think people got the information from that structure to be able to sort of send fake emails quite convincing with the exact job title people have got and stuff like that. I mean, is that something you'd advise to continue with, having a staff structure so publicly, or is it off to us? Really?
It's up to you. I think it is up to you. I think the it depends what it what the purposes of having it there, and if it is causing you so security issues, if there's no if there's no reason to have it, then I would say it makes sense to remove it, or at least remove the some of the information. But most, most organizations have their team and their structure and their their job title is, is relatively commonplace, yeah,
yeah, yeah, trying
to find ways to Nick Money Online scampi, yeah,
yeah, oh yeah. I think maybe we could look at just putting the SLT, the senior leadership team and the CEO, I don't know if it leads the senior management team, plus, you know, the people under that. Maybe it's too much to kind of add them all, like you say, if it's them, issues of spam and that then, because I get inundated with marketing emails. I mean, a lot of it is from LinkedIn, but,
oh, you're very brave putting that on. LinkedIn. Oh, that
was a huge regret. I did not know getting myself into I'm still getting emails from India now, and I'm like, how do you how do you have my details? I've deleted them
now. Well, this week, obviously you messaged me and then I clicked on your profile. As you do have a bit of a stalk and see what's going on. And now I saw that your personals are on,
Never again, never never again. And I've not even gone with anybody that's emailed me. I've literally just, obviously, I reckon I remember you from when we initially spoke a while ago. And then I just, I've kind of spoke to a few other recommendations, and I just kind of wish I'd never posted that now as a big mistake in everyone,
yeah, we're just about to recruit a new web person as well, and even even posting it on it's just the amount of nonsense. Even then, when you say, you know, we want someone to come into the office, but based in the Midlands, in England, and you just get so much, like worldwide, globally, just like you've not read this, or you don't care,
yeah, it did. It
did. It did make me go. I felt for you and I saw you. Yeah, I'm trying to
think if there's anything else on top of that. I was spent all that time working on that document. I actually forgot to write down questions. But if I think of anything, then I'll just I've got your email. I can email you wrote any questions that I do have, but I think, I think probably the next step is to kind of see the proposal, and I'm sure we'll have more questions from there. Anyway.
When do you want? When, when you have to prepare? What's your sort of time frames on things?
I mean, just whenever suits you, really. We're not, kind of itching to rush the process. I think one of the one of the things I'm working on at the minute is a new marketing budget. So the finance team are quite keen to kind of get my marketing budget, which will include the website, so more from just a financial point of view, we are kind of, like, looking to get something in the next few weeks, just so we can kind of go back to finance and say, like, look, this is the estimate cost for a website and go from there. But you know, we're like, I say we're not rushing. So it's not immediate. So just kind of, I mean, how long do you think it would take for you to, kind of work on a proposal?
I'd say, if you could give us two to three weeks, I need, I need a deadline. Because I don't know about you if I've got, if I've got a deadline, it's always the deadline. You work for that deadline. If you said on Friday, I probably find a way of making it happen. But yeah, I think if we said, if we were aiming for maybe the the end of the maybe the fifth, fourth or fifth of July as an estimate, just two weeks,
yeah, of course, yeah, that works for us,
definitely. And I might send over the branding stuff earlier than that. If we, if we get on it'll have a bit more fun stuff to it for you to have a look at as well. Sure send over that by the fourth or fifth of July. About the fourth, don't forget to vote for I'm branding, yeah, perfect. So you aiming for April? I would say, try and get started by September. Okay, from just from that should give you flex along the way. Yeah, because they always, websites always take longer than you think they're going to. It depends on your especially with charities and trustees and all the different levels of buying you potentially have. I'm not sure the structure is, but yeah, August, September, yeah, kicking off. September, October. It should give you six, seven months to get it sorted and up and running, ready for April?
Yeah, no, but I kind of expected that anyway. I knew we needed to kind of start sooner rather than later, because content takes such a long time to kind of gather and speaking with the senior leadership team, etc, and service users, doing research. It's, yeah, it's a big project, but I'm going to embrace it. It's going to be good.
That's cool. Well, we'll, if we put our proposal to start in September, we'll aim for like a kickoff in September, and like, lay it out in that way. But if it starts later, we can condense it. If it starts earlier, we've got a bit more, bit more time. But if we use that as a starting point to give you just the structure of how we how we plan it out, that's that should, should be helpful.
How does payments work? Is it, do you kind of pay by project? Is it broken down into, yeah, yeah. So
we know what we normally do is we normally take about 25 ish percent as a commencement payment, and then we just spread the rest out across the projects with the final payment due on go live. So there's a sort of we'd normally, I'm guessing, October, November, December, January, February, March. Gosh, what's that? 17, let's say 10% per month. Roughly, after that, like 25% and 10% per month across the thing. But again, we've had charities who've said, we need to spend this money by this date, and can we just pay you now? We've had some who said, you know, we can. We'd split it into just four equal payments, or 50% upfront. Like we we're relatively flexible. We try and we try and do that, because it just helps. It helps us from a cash flow point. We've got ongoing costs attached to it, so we just, we spread it across. That's fine.
Yeah, is there like an ongoing maintenance plan as well for changes as we have to launch the site? Any sort of changes? Do you offer any sort of plan we can Yeah,
we offer sort of gin, basic maintenance, where we sort of the site's updated every week. So we go in and check all the plugins, security certification, that sort of stuff. It's monitor 24/7, and things like monthly reporting, Google Analytics, integration, that sort of stuff. And then so that, I think that's off the top of my head, we start about 120 pounds a month. Don't quote me on that. And then we, we, you can choose accessibility or not, which obviously is another 40 ish pounds a month, pounds or dollars can't remember. And then there are different levels of that. So we have, like a gold standard that's got additional security features, additional this and that and the other. We also offer reduced so our normal hourly rate, sort of 80 for charities, 80 pounds. But we do, like a four hourly bundle, so that for extra support each month, or that you can just buy and chip away at for extra support. We try and make it so that you can manage your site yourselves. So we in an ideal world, you don't want to be asking us every 25 minutes to change a word, add an image, you know. We try and make it so you don't need us. So we we normally say, well, just start off on the standard maintenance stuff. So we make sure the site's working, and then if you find that you need more support, you can ask us for that as and when you need it. So our aim is that you don't need us day to day. If you've got bigger project, like you want to add a new function, want to add new pages or new sections to the site, anything that's structural or functional, we recommend you probably involve us or someone else who knows what they're doing. If it's just day to day, changes the way we set it up, your site is backed up between one and four times a day anyway, so you you're never that far away from a site that's working. So if you have a play, you mess something up, we can back it up. You can also back it up, automate yourselves before you make any changes, just if you feel in a minute. Of course, we also do a standard training session. So when the site's launched and live, we'll do a training session with whoever, however many people you want to be involved in that which we record. And then we'll chunk that up into just bite sized sections. So how to use WordPress, how to add a blog, how to change text, how to add an image. So you've got, like, a bit of a resource library of easy how to so that if you get stuck. You can, you can self serve, but also we're on the end of the phone, like we're not going to charge you for a five minute call if you just need to figure out, like most of the most website stuff is just knowing which button to press. So sometimes it's, I can't remember what to press to do this, and we'll just talk you through it. So we're we're pretty we're on the end of the phone. We're normal people. Cool. I'm mindful of your time to think you've got another flag in that is one,
no, it's okay, but yeah. Thank you so much. It's been really valuable to us to kind of learn a little bit more about you guys and what you offer. So, yeah, we look forward to seeing the proposal. Yeah,
cool. Like, if you do anything, drop me a message on LinkedIn, give me a call, email, whatever I'm more than happy to chat through, even if, if someone else says something else, and you just want to check, check that through, just feel free to give me a call. We had a lovely tweet about.