Rise Youth Dance are a Bristol-based arts charity that offer high quality dance classes for children and teenagers. Their Performance group appear at events across the city, and many students go on to train as dance professionals. Rise have a particular focus on some of the more deprived parts of the city and aim to bring dance to children whatever their background.
The Brief
As a result, their website had to cater for several different user groups. The main audience was parents and young people looking to attend classes, but the site also needed to appeal to schools booking educational workshops, and reinforce Rise’s professional credentials to funding bodies.
Rise had a site that had been set up several years ago. While they liked the design and general layout of the site, over the years the structure had become confused and there were multiple pages that covered the same topics. No one at Rise really knew how to manage the site, so it felt too daunting to make major changes.
After reviewing the site, we agreed with Rise that the site could benefit from a streamlined structure and more engaging page layouts. The Rise team had some thoughts about how to do this, but they were also open to ideas and gave us free rein to design new page layouts while retaining the original colour scheme and feel.
Problem Solving
Rise had received a grant to update their website so had a very strict budget to work with. It was clear that the size of their website meant that updating the whole site would not be possible without going over budget. We had to come up with a strategy that would cover all their content without increasing the number of hours we would work on the project.
The Rise team were keen to learn how to manage the site themselves anyway, so we agreed to teach the admin staff how to edit and add content as the first stage of the project. This meant we were able to work with the admin team to update and develop content as the project moved along. It also meant that instead of building whole pages, we just made a template for each type of content, and Rise dropped in the appropriate images and words.
Results
This was a great compromise and worked really well. We were able to concentrate on creating a well-organised, engaging, and user-friendly design, while the Rise team could review and update all the site content page by page. Although Rise could not contribute additional money to the project budget, by providing administrative support they ensured all their content was on brand and that they got incredible value for money. Almost all of our time on this project was spent on technical or design work, without having to complete basic tasks like spell-checking copy or picking images. As a result, the new website looks as though it cost significantly more than it did, and Rise were thrilled with their new site, as well as feeling confident and empowered to keep it updated in the future.
“Jenny at Red Spark Digital built a new website for RISE Youth Dance in 2023.
We were really delighted with the outcome. We had limited funding to support the work and what she managed to achieve in the time exceeded our expectations.
None of our small team have much expertise and she took us through the process clearly, explaining our options within our budget and how much input was needed from us.
We wanted a dynamic, image-based website which clearly demonstrated to all of our stakeholders what we do, and that is what Jenny created.”
Sarah Kingswell, Company Manager
