Client

Diversity Project Website

Project Overview

HT Financial Marketing worked closely with The Diversity Project (DP) to deliver their new website.  Since its launch in 2016, The DP has grown significantly, it’s website now hosts over 1000 pieces of content and resources to help members accelerate DEI in their firms. The existing website was built as a ‘brochure’ site with limited content. While the site had been adapted to host more content, the fundamental requirements had changed, and a new information-centric website, with a strong information architecture was required to ensure content was well organised and easy to locate.

Due to the nature of the work of the DP, which includes advocating and setting best practices on neurodiversity and disability, accessibility was very important. We wanted to demonstrate to the Industry what good looks like, therefore, having an accessible website wasn’t a want, but a must.  To do this we:

• Included the ability to change font size on our homepage and Disability/Neurodiversity workstream pages
• included alt text on our images
• ensured links were clearly defined
• added link focus states
• ensured there are no duplicated section ID’s and
• made sure that contrast ratio was sufficient throughout the website.

All of the above helps to ensure our screenreaders, neurodiverse and disabled users can navigate the website easily.

To assess the website’s accessibility, we tested the site using SiteImprove’s online accessibility checker. The results were:

WCAG A results – 100/100
WCAG AA results – 100/100
WCAG AAA results – 76/100

Throughout the project we worked closely with all 15 of the DP workstreams to ensure they were providing the most cohesive, up-to-date information for their pages. On top of this, we also included pages with bios and images for members of the Board, SteerCo, Advisory Council and Ambassadors so the people behind the hard work are recognised.

Events and webinars are often front and centre of the DP’s work, with workstreams hosting a plethora of events throughout the year, therefore, it was important that they were made easily accessible, all relevant information was intuitive to find, and users were able to register with ease.

The old website had a domain authority of 38, we set out to improve this and with the new website we have increased it to 65! The website had 85,000 user sessions in 2021, with 170,000 page views and we are on track to see an improvement on this over the next year. Since the launch of the website there has also been an increase in firms contacting the DP via the ‘contact us’ form on the website, as well as partners and individuals that would like to get involved.

“Linda’s expertise and exceptional management skills played a pivotal role in the delivery of a complex and large website project. There were lots of moving parts throughout but thankfully, Linda was on hand to ensure the project ran as smoothly as possible. Linda’s partnership approach allowed for creative freedom, whilst knowing exactly what needed to be achieved and by when.”

Reece Matthews, Co-founder and COO, Hewitt Matthews