Maritime UK Solent commissioned Cavendish to create a new web platform, which needed to engage stakeholders from inside and outside the Solent area.
Background
Maritime UK Solent is a regional maritime cluster and employer representative body that champions the Solent region’s maritime strengths and assets. Part of Maritime UK but focusing their attention on the Solent and the maritime businesses within the area.
The Solent area is known for its rich maritime innovation and technological excellence, and Maritime UK Solent needed a website to promote these ideals while raise the profile of the area and the maritime industry.
Maritime UK Solent commissioned Cavendish to create the new web platform, which needed to engage stakeholders from inside and outside the Solent area.
The website also needed to highlight the benefits of becoming a member and support the promotion of key events and thought leadership and support the annual Maritime UK Solent awards.
Strategy
Starting with an intensive research and discovery period, we combined data driven insights with the brief to create an intuitive user driven design that would support a diverse range of stakeholders, from SME business owners to FTSE100 organisations, the wider maritime sector, and national and regional politicians. Detailed discussions with the client to better understand the different stakeholders that made up the target audience informed in-depth navigation and content planning for the site. From this we created an interactive prototype of the website for the client to review and test before we went into design.
Maritime UK Solent’s website needed to be visually engaging, as befitting the well-known beauty of the Solent area, and easy to use. An intuitive UX and impactful design helped to achieve both.
Encouraging Maritime businesses to engage with the organisation, sign up to events, and become members.
As a member-led organisation, the website also needed to:
- meet accessibility guidelines
- provide intuitive user journeys for a variety of stakeholders with diverse needs
- capture contact details to enable ongoing communication.
- Provide a durable mechanism for the Maritime UK Solent Awards, promoting the categories, supporting submission, and cope with surges in traffic around entry deadlines.
The
results.
Since launch, traffic has increased to the site by 91% on the previous year and the website continues to perform very well. This increase has been led by an SEO-friendly WordPress setup and a search-friendly technical support and reporting package, that has helped the client analyse the website data and make data-informed decisions.
The website currently enjoys an engagement rate of 71% and saw 1,923 form entries come in for the hugely successful 2024 Maritime UK Solent Awards. Average dwell time is also just over five minutes, with five pages viewed per session.
91%
Website traffic increase since launch.
71%
Website engagement rate.
