Gingerbread

Gingerbread, the leading single parent charity in the UK, came to us with a dated looking WordPress site and a long list of bug bears. During the pitching process, we advised a rebuild would be more expensive than working with what they had, so they asked us reshape their cumbersome goliath into a fresh, effective online presence.

So far, we’ve transformed the look of their site, ironed out lots of niggles, and are now moving them forward with growing their community.

You make it look so seamless it makes me wonder what other people have been doing all this time.

Vaila McClure

Head of Comms and Marketing

Website Rebrand

Pretty much the first port of call when we started working with Gingerbread was to implement a completely new look and feel to their old website. The challenge here was that there was a tight deadline and the branding agency weren’t going to be able to give us the new brand until the last minute. So we did much of the work blind, and then brought it all together at the last minute.

Expand

Salesforce CRM integration

To help alleviate current user record inefficiencies, we’re integrating seamlessly with Salesforce as well as MailChimp, Raisely, LifterLMS and BuddyBoss. We’ve also built Gingerbread a custom WordPress plugin to help with mailing list hygiene, as existing plugins weren’t quite hitting the mark. This work will help the organisation but also benefit user experience by ensuring those seeking help have all their information to hand.

Content discovery & retention

Gingerbread’s website contained so much information it was hard for single parents to see the wood for the trees. Following a content cull, we worked with them to figure out a strategy, followed by the design and technical build, of new content filters. This included the ability for visitors to bookmark resources they wish to come back to, teaming this with new ways to onboard visitors to increase acquisition and retention.

Server migration

Gingerbread’s hosting was creaking at the seams, and whilst we prefer to optimise code to cope more effectively rather than just throw money at hosting, there comes a point where you need to upgrade. So we seamlessly moved them – and their vast database of users and content – to a brand new shiny server, instantly helping load times and user experience in the process.

We also configured offsite back ups to ensure business continuity in the event of a data disaster, and we now manage their hosting for them to ensure everything is up to date for security.

Flexible CMS

Gingerbread can now quickly and easily create great looking pages that are varied and hold their visitors’ interest.

Our Flexible CMS pages use a combination of Advanced Custom Fields and Gutenberg for the easiest admin user experience, meaning all pages created are on brand and look great.

We’ve also helped Gingerbread manage their admins’ roles and the editorial approval process, ensuring content creation remains tidy and organised amongst a big team.

Plugin Audit

As is often the way with old WordPress sites which haven’t had an awful lot of technical love, there were a lot of plugins which weren’t needed. Extra plugins bring bloat and insecurities to a site, so we worked with Gingerbread to identify plugins which were surplus to requirements, or which could be replaced with something lighter.

We now review and upgrade their plugins on a schedule, and proactively do additional upgrades when we learn a particular plugin needs an update. Gingerbread can sit back knowing this is all taken care of.

I’m really proud of the work we’re doing with Gingerbread. They’re a fantastic team to work with and our catch up calls are always filled with an excitement that we’re moving things forward in cost effective, innovate ways.

Lisa Bailey

Director, 18a

Our approach

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