A user-friendly platform that encourages engagement.
Background
Ebbsfleet is a 21st century pioneer – the first garden city for 100 years being created on 2,500 acres of brownfield land on the Kent Thames Riverside. Ebbsfleet Development Corporation was established as to spearhead this project and the creation of 15,000 new homes.
With the growth of Ebbsfleet as a Garden City and the desire to promote the area as a great place to live, work and locate your business, Ebbsfleet Development Corporation needed a website that would highlight the town and its status as a hub of culture and commerce. It also needed to provide useful information to Ebbsfleet residents, those wishing to move to Ebbsfleet, current and potential businesses, as well as future investors.
Strategy
Our strategy was to understand stakeholder feedback on the previous website and use insight and data to inform the creation of a user-friendly platform that encouraged engagement with Ebbsfleet Development Corporation.
The 4-month project began with an in-depth programme of Discovery to identify user needs through workshops, surveys, heatmapping and Google Analytics. We found the website was slow on mobile devices, the CMS was difficult to use, and key content was not getting traffic. Additionally, scroll depth on frequently visited pages was low.
An exit survey revealed over 60% of users couldn’t find what they were looking for, highlighting the need for clear user journeys built on detailed user stories. This research helped define user groups and their ideal journeys, informing the development of the sitemap and overall UX.
We worked closely with the Ebbsfleet team to develop a content plan for the website, ensuring the site was optimised for search and providing the right level of information. We also designed an interactive prototype to test our recommendations and ensure stakeholder approval before proceeding to design. The design was crafted to showcase life in Ebbsfleet through a careful balance of imagery and text, to create a vibrant, friendly, and accessible design.
Before launch we implemented an SEO exercise to ensure best practice for indexability and set up conversion tracking to measure engagement.
The
results.
Year-on-year, the website’s performance has seen strong improvement.
- Since launch, it has attracted nearly 14,000 visits with an engagement rate of 62%.
- Average engagement time has surged to 2 minutes and 36 seconds, a significant increase from the previous 1 minute and 12 seconds.
- The website now passes the Core Web Vitals speed test, a notable upgrade from its earlier performance.
The website also aimed to improve engagement with stakeholders through a contact form and newsletter sign-up, resulting in over 300 signups and enquiries in the past 6-months, reinforcing its crucial role in ongoing engagement.
62%
Engagement rate from nearly 14,000 visitors.
300
Contact form and newsletter sign-ups.
