Benchmarks
90
Google PageSpeed Score
Google's website performance benchmark
90 out of 100.A
WebPagetest Grade
Graded on site performance, page size and load times
A94
Website Grader Score
Calculated on general, mobile, SEO and security performance
94 out of 100.Brief
Brief
The events and marketing team at Essex County Council approached us with a project to replace the existing Visit Parks website with a new website, Explore Essex, that expanded on the remit of Visit Parks to encompass places and events across Essex beyond those happening in the parks and green spaces.
The new site needed to be appealing to a broad audience, including people looking for day trips, school days, nights out, venue hire, walks and people planning weddings or civil partnerships.
Being part of a local government agency the Explore Essex site needed to adhere to the strict accessibility and best practice standards in this sector so a lot of time and effort needed to be invested in making the site AA accessible, as well as being secure, fast and responsive.
What we did
What we did
The project timeline was tight and a fully-formed development site needed to be available before the Christmas break giving us just twelve weeks but we were confident in our abilities and the capabilities of Craft CMS to deliver the project brief on time.
As Explore Essex already had a design and branding partner involved we worked closely with them during the design phase providing feedback and answering questions related to the website design as it evolved.
With the design work complete we translated the approved artwork into working Craft CMS templates and web pages ready for content entry. As our development work evolved we kept in close contact with the client keeping them updated with our progress and fielding any comments or questions.
The most challenging aspects of the project were the custom events search and filtering tools and enabling a "block" approach to page design instead of relying on rigid page templates, this allowed the client to build a wide variety of pages with a huge mixture of content based on all the content element types available to them in Craft CMS.
