The Tropical Health and Education Trust, or THET for short, pride themselves on being practical, sustainable and responsive.
When I designed their new site, I wanted to make sure it was practical, sustainable and responsive too! Make sure you check out the new site, and the work that THET do, at www.thet.org.
The Old Site
It had been quite some time since the THET site had been built. The logo (1) seemed dated, the colour scheme and layout felt awkward (2, 3, 4) and did not encourage the user to start a journey through the site.
The previous site was built on a basic CMS and was primarily navigated using frames. This made it difficult to update, an SEO nightmare, and it did little to promote the excellent work that THET undertakes around the world. In short, it needed some love.
The New Site
It needed to be easy. For everyone.
I worked on THET pro bono, which meant there was a limit on the time I had to complete the project. To give myself a kickstart I made three decisions:
- I needed to implement a user-friendly CMS which THET could easily use. Without question it had to be WordPress
- I wanted to start with a pre-built template which I could customise for THET
- I would then spend my time developing the custom design and functionality that THET needed, rather than going through countless revisions of the initial design.
Once I’d chosen a theme (from the excellent WooThemes) I started to turn it into a new site for THET.
Building the Widgets
WordPress custom fields come to the rescue!
The hardest part of this site bulid was the Link Search facility. THET creates ‘links’ between healthcare professionals in the UK and overseas, and they needed a way to maintain information on these links, and to make this information fully searchable.
Whilst a custom database could have been used, I did not have the development time to build the front and back-ends. Instead I opted for the rather powerful WordPress Custom Fields.
THET simply create a new page and use custom fields to specify where the health link is and what it specialises in. I then created a drop down menu that, once submitted, searches all the custom fields and presents the relevant results.
Finding your way around
Rewriting the navigation system to work with pages
The final piece of the puzzle was to rewrite the navigation system. By default, WordPress is happy to work with categories but finds it a little harder to work with pages.
It was essential that the site was smart, and adjusted the navigation as THET added and removed new sections and pages. I had to write a custom function that did this and not only displayed parent and child pages, but omitted all grandchildren.
Although we initially worked with a pre-built template, I ended up rewriting a significant number of PHP pages and CSS stylesheets, ultimately creating a completely new child theme.
Final thoughts
Thousands of new people are discovering THET every week
We’re very lucky that this site has attracted a lot of positive attention, and this is a great thing because THET carries out amazing and essential work in some of the poorest countries in the world. It was a pleasure to be part of such a worthwhile project.
“I am thrilled with the new site and everyone absolutely loves it! I’ve heard nothing but positive feedback and everyone is hailing you as a God!” – Erin Mewa, Marketing Manager, THET.
“We’ve had fabulous feedback from our externals, staff and trustees.” Pia MacRae, Chief Executive, THET
New THET logo by James Golding. Site based on a template from WooThemes.
Design, CSS, PHP, jQuery and HTML by me.
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