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Fusion Arts website refresh
Creating an online hub for Fusion Arts
Background
In 2021, Oxford-based community charity Fusion Arts' website was in desperate need of an overhaul. The existing site had been developed in the mid 2000s and was later transferred to a different web hosting service with reduced compatibility. Between this transfer, the website's age, outdated design and limited capabilities, it had been rendered unfit for purpose. Behind the scenes, the website was running on a lot of broken coding and defunct software, which resulted in swathes of the site being inaccessible on the front-end and un-editable from the back-end. The CMS platform was difficult to work with as corrupted code meant the site could not be updated, which made adding and updating content challenging. Worse still, there were big front-end functionality, UI and UX issues such as the contact form no longer conveying user messages and the original design of the site having
been augmented to an extent that finding necessary information had become confusing and cumbersome.
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The Fusion team also felt that a lot of the copy and information on their website no longer captured the essence of Fusion Arts, was inaccurate, or written in an inconsistent tone of voice.
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Although these days, social media is typically the first port of call for
information seekers, websites are still an important aspect of an organisation's digital presence. For charities, it's a place for funders, board members, media, researchers, curious locals etc. to access in-depth information about the establishment and their activities. It should also be a hub for would-be participants, customers, artistic/project partners, volunteers and employees to find out how they can get involved or access events, support and opportunities.
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In Fusion Arts' case, a large function of their website is as a public archive for many of the hundreds of community arts projects that they have run since their inception in 1977. However on their previous website, project entries were often difficult or impossible to access.
As a result of these inadequacies, the team contracted digital development and design studio Kaleido Grafik to give Fusion Arts an online makeover and bring their website into 2022!
Brief
"Our website is outdated and no longer fit for purpose. We need a site that effectively functions as an online hub for Fusion Arts. We need an intuitive, accessible, user-friendly platform that all of our stakeholders can use to find updates and information, get in touch, and access opportunities, projects, support, events and donation options. We want design and copy that reflects the playful, creative, inclusive and socially-conscious ethos of Fusion Arts. Can you make it happen?"
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Process
As the Digital Marketing, Communications and PR Manager of Fusion Arts at the time, I was closely involved with this project. My roles included being the primary liaison between Fusion Arts and Kaleido Grafik, leading team idea generation and feedback sessions, presenting the website to the team at various stages of development, auditing and reporting UI issues to Kaleido Grafik, working with Kaleido Grafik to perfect the website's design, UX and accessibility requirements, updating existing and creating new website content, revising Fusion's mission statement and writing other copy as required.
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Kaleido Grafik worked iteratively with us produce the bespoke site. Initial steps included filling out a questionnaire to pin down the organisation's vision, mission, unique selling point, core values and target audience. We then met with Kaleido Grafik to discuss how this could inform the aesthetics and functionality of the website and the organisation's mission statement. As a team, we decided that Fusion's core focus on creativity, belonging and fun needed to be prominently showcased through the website's visuals and copy. We determined that to feel welcoming, the design should strike a balance between simple modern interfaces showing the organisation's highlights and the informal, analogue, hand-made and 'paint-splattered' nature of Fusion's work. We also discussed what sections and features should or should not be included on the website, for instance deciding that Fusion's blog, news and articles could all be grouped under the same 'article' heading. Due to the volume of content archived on the website, we agreed that a filtering and search system would be useful across the site and for certain sections such as the 'Events' and 'Projects' pages. Based on these discussions, Kaleido Grafik developed a site map for us.
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Once we had signed off on the general layout, Kaleido Grafik started putting our ideas into action. They presented us with a website colour scheme made up of bright primary shades that met the Google Chrome Lighthouse contrast standards. We liked the playful, varied colours but felt that a few did not match with Fusion's brand. These were swapped for more Fusion-y shades of fuchsia and emerald green.
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Once the visuals and structure of the site were finished, an intern and I began using its CMS to populate the website with content including project entries, articles and past and upcoming events listings. Content population was a combination of editing and uploading articles from the old website, adding project updates and writing brand new articles and project entries informed by social media copy, press releases, newsletter articles, internal reports, information on the shared work drive, analogue archives and descriptions from other colleagues. This was a sizeable task given that Fusion has been producing creative projects and events for over 45 years and within past two years it had undergone a period of rapid expansion, running more projects than ever. Due to the inadequacies of the previous website, much of this work had hitherto gone undocumented online. This, combined with the need to track down information and images across various sources for a large volume of projects made this one of the most challenging tasks of the redevelopment. A selection of long and short-form content that I produced for the site is linked below:
Fusion Arts' homepage prior to the redevelopment
Maps showing the proposed site structure
The initial proposed colour scheme and the revised one used on the finished site
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Left: the old logo; middle and right: the revamped logos - full circle and sunrise variations
Still of splash page (before copy edits)
"We connect people, celebrate diversity and drive social justice through our innovative community arts projects"
Top row left: splash page; top row right: a lower homepage section; middle row left: main projects page; middle row left & right & bottom row left: events main pages; bottom row middle: the 'Our Story' page; bottom row right: scroll through of a project entry (all pages as displayed on a PC)
Left: a website article in situ; right: scroll through of a website article
"Based in the heart of East Oxford, we’ve been initiating creative projects that inspire communities, support artists and promote social justice since 1977"
- Copy extract from the 'Our Story' section
Examples of functional copy that I authored
The designers also produced a new, streamlined Fusion Arts logo. It retained the sun motif of the existing logo but swapped the lemon yellow for a warmer, darker yellow. Other elements of the pre-existing logo were simplified and a rounder, warmer, more contemporary-feeling typeface was used.
The next step was for Kaleido Grafik to start building the site. They worked with pre-existing site copy and images to build an engaging splash page. We were really happy with what they came up with, feeling that the paintbrush stroke, choice of typeface and the ever-shifting image carousel blob captured the balance between playful, analogue, boundless creativity and the warm, progressive, accessible ethos that we had wanted.
Having hit the ground running with the splash page, Kaleido Grafik started building the rest of the site. In the meantime, I led several mission statement-building workshops for my colleagues in which they answered, in their own words, the following questions: Who are we? What do we do? Why do we do it? These sessions generated many valuable ideas and phrases, some of which I incorporated into the finished mission statement and 'Our Story' page copy. For the splash page, I decided to keep the "Fusion Arts is a catalyst for creativity" tagline and augment it with the following:
I felt that this was a succinct, dynamic and accessibly-worded way of conveying the crucial aspects of Fusion's mission, emphasising their focus on people, arts, social progression and diversity.
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While the designers built the website, I was auditing and testing it page by page, working with them to identify any glitches, necessary additions, UX, UI and accessibility issues. I was also sharing the developing site with my Fusion colleagues, keeping them up-to-date with developments and seeking their feedback on the progress. To identify and correct any rendering glitches, the team helped me test the site on various internet browsers using range of different devices including Android and Apple computers, phones, and tablets.
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The finished site design features big bright images, a vibrant colour palette with yellow as the lead accent colour, wavy motifs, simple visual icons and a sleek scrolling interface. There is a homepage, an events section (events are colour-coded and divided into exhibitions, workshops & classes and live events), an 'Our Story' page (encompassing the organisation's mission, history, funders and staff), an articles section, a 'Get Involved' button with several options for collaboration, a donation portal, a contact page and a site-wide search tool. View the completed website here.
I was also responsible for writing functional copy for the dropdown menus, section headers and the 'contact' and 'about' pages. The challenge was wording descriptions in language optimised for ease of use and SEO whilst retaining a peppy, action-inspiring tone.
How I put Fusion Arts' mission into words
As much of the organisation's work involves special interest groups, an additional task was proof-reading and revising copy from the old website to ensure that all terminology was accurate, inclusive, respectful and politically correct. Another consideration when populating the website was the responsible use of photographs. As per Fusion Arts' photography policy, all identifiable features of minors and vulnerable individuals needed to be obscured or cropped out (except in imagery depicting six or more people). I also worked with Kaleido Grafik to develop accessibility and privacy policies. As per the accessibility policy, image descriptions were added to all media. A final consideration was SEO, which involved testing the SEO performance of key phrases to access pages using a built-in SEO checker.
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Once the finished website had been presented to and signed off on by the rest of the Fusion team, it was time to make it live! After nearly a year of development, the new website and logo refresh was launched in February 2022. I announced the transition on Fusion Arts' social media accounts using posts and Instagram stories showing off its features.
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Results
In the first month of its launch, the website received 124 visits, a 341% increase from the month prior to launch. 76 of the visitors clicked through from Instagram / Linktree. There was a 567% increase in web traffic to Fusion Arts' event listings, a 233% increase in contact form submission and a 86% increase in article clicks in the month following the site's launch. The website received 100% positive sentiment responses on social media, and has garnered a lot of positive verbal feedback from stakeholders. Common feedback has included "I understand Fusion Arts as an organisation so much more now!" "I can finally book your classes online - hurray!" "It's useful to find all of your information in one place" and "the site is much easier to use now".
A selection of positive social media responses to the new website