ERIC
Who is ERIC?
ERIC is a medium-sized charity that supports families whose children have bowel and bladder conditions. They provide information and emotional support to families and to the health and education professionals who support them.
Their website serves their community with a library of information on this range of health conditions, offers education resources for professionals to download and use in their workplace, and enables visitors to make donations to support their work.
What was the brief?
In 2022, ERIC decided to move from a closed API website to a more flexible platform, giving them more control on how they display their content, and to improve the experience for the site for users, who had been frustrated with some of the limitations of the old site.
What were the challenges?
ERIC’s previous website worked well, but had reached the limit of the flexibility that the platform offered. They wanted to improve the variety of content and services they could offer to their community through their website and so decided to go ahead with a rebuild using a new platform.
Initially they anticipated a simple lift and shift of their previous navigation and formatting, but with our guidance and input, we identified significant changes that would improve their new site.
In particular, they were keen to improve their online shop, creating a better experience for their customers, and to enable them to grow their sales and customer base and to grow this income stream for the charity.
What was the solution?
We carefully considered what had been specified in the brief and delivered a proposal that addressed the goals they had identified.
Through a series of conversations, we identified the challenges faced by ERIC, and tailored a set of creative, but simple, solutions to help them build improvements into their new site – with the focus on avoiding repetition of the same problems they had with their old site.
We brought in additional expertise to help ERIC with SEO on some of their key pages, helping them to focus on the important messages that they knew were needed to engage with a larger audience.
How did the process go?
Toco Digital began by building a new e-commerce site, and this went live first. This immediately demonstrated a massive improvement for the sales team at ERIC and for their customers.
The larger project to rebuild the main website followed. Our go-to designer came up with a clean, cheerful design for the site that nicely reflected the tone and style of the charity.
One challenge was to find a better way of navigating around lots of different resources – including factsheets, videos, downloads, articles and links. Previously this information was scattered across the site, and sometimes difficult to find.
Following consultation, we created a smart tabulated table element that enabled ERIC to store all of the relevant resources on the correct pages, so visitors are not sent hither and thither across different pages.
What were the results of the new website?
ERIC have significantly increased sales from their online shop and seen more visitor numbers on the site. After their switch to the new platform, sales increased by 28%.
The new e-commerce site has been easy for the staff at ERIC to maintain and update and has brought them significant time efficiencies in how they handle sales - requiring approximately 25% fewer staff hours than they needed for the previous lower level of sales.
Their SEO rankings have improved dramatically and some of their key content is ranking top or just below on their targeted keywords, which has increased the visibility of their brand and lent further authority to their work.
In their words...
Kris and Matt at Toco Digital have really listened to what we wanted to do and didn’t try to suggest any off the shelf, template solutions that would limit our ambition in what we were trying to achieve. During the build they were reliable, delivered on time and helped us to push ourselves and learn more as we went along. They didn’t spoon feed us or create features or functionality that we didn’t understand or didn’t need, but took us on a learning journey along with them so that we have been able to independently work to update and maintain the website ourselves after it went live.
They have always been accessible, supporting us with fine tuning the site after it went live and suggesting creative solutions when we want to do something new.
Working with Toco Digital has felt like a proper partnership that we had an equal voice in. Toco Digital listened to what we wanted, and we have ended up with a site that suits our needs and gives us a platform for building upon in the future.
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