A new website for Fair Trade Wales

Fair Trade is a global movement that puts people and the planet before profit. They connect producers and consumers, and work to make supply chains more transparent so that consumers have better choices to shop responsibly. Fair Trade Wales needed a new bilingual website to publish news, promote campaigns and share resources with regional fair trade organisations.

A fresh look

Fair Trade Wales were in the process of rebranding and had recently commissioned an elegant new logo.

We built the new look for their site around the logo – extending the colour palette and adding a set of repeatings patterns to their arsenal.

Just the right amount of complexity

The site was built on WordPress which was already familiar to the small team at Fair Trade Wales.

The site is bilingual (Welsh and English) and we added a number of custom post-types and taxonomies (catergories) to help them manage their content.

• Campaigns – these record major projects that Fair Trade Wales have carried out over the years. From the 2008 campaign to make Wales the first ‘Fair Trade Nation’ to their annual “Fair Trade Fortnight”
• Organisations – the site contains a directory of fair trade organisations, from retail to local fair trade groups
• Resources – links to online resources as well as printed materials and even costumes which are available to order on the site

The balance we aim to strike is between providing useful features without making the site too difficult or cumbersome to manage. Especially when building a site for a small, busy team with lots of other work to get on with.

Collaboration

We really enjoyed the collaboration on this project. We used the Content Design method to establish audience, user needs and to map their journey, and met on a regular basis to report on progress and keep checking and challenging our assumptions throughout the project.

Proper Design were great to work with on our website project. Experts in both the visual look and back-end build, they regularly produced ideas and creative solutions to the many problems we threw at them, including some we didn’t realise we had, all whilst knowing and considering our capacity to maintain running a website as such a small team. In the depths of this past winters lockdown, we really looked forward to our meetings with Proper, which were fun, thoughtful and productive all at the same time. Their focus on getting to know us an organisation and our needs makes them stand out as a company to work with

Aileen Burmeister – Head of Fair Trade Wales