Bristol Creative Industries is the South West’s biggest network of creative freelancers, agencies and businesses, bringing together the best and brightest talents in the region. In 2020, they unveiled their new brand, evolving from Bristol Media to Bristol Creative Industries. To showcase their stand out new brand, they needed an equally compelling digital experience for their members.
A new membership website for the South West’s biggest creative network.
How we helped
- WordPress development
- WordPress for Memberships
- Digital strategy
- Website design
Challenge
In addition to a bold new creative direction, the Bristol Media website had years of content, functionality and a large, active user base that needed to be migrated. The site boasted a popular jobs board, user generated content and profiles and all of this content needed to be re-thought and delivered on the new site.
There were also questions about platform.
After a number of years, their custom build site was starting to show it’s age and modifications and enhancements were becoming more complex and time consuming to deliver. Given its wide adoption and open-source status, WordPress was a natural consideration for the Bristol Creative Industries team.
Solution
Using WordPress, we reimagined the site functionality and structure, incorporating the new branding and design language. Jobs, Member Profiles and a new Member dashboard made it simpler for members to engage with the site, add content and access more benefits of membership.
Prior to the new site, the team at Bristol Creative Industries had to manually contact, invoice and renew each member annually. By integrating Stripe, we delivered the ability for members to buy and renew their membership online, drastically reducing the level of administrative overhead for the team.
“The Appeal team have worked wonders with BCI’s new website. They took the time to get to know us as an organisation and understand our raison d’etre, values and what we needed the new site to achieve for us. It was a complex project with many different layers but the end result is a site that truly represents BCI. It’s been received incredibly positively by our members and partners. Web builds are often stressful but the Appeal team made it a pleasurable journey from start to finish and their ongoing support is second to none.”
Chris Thurling
Chairman – Bristol Creative Industries
