Sheffield City Region Growth Hub

  • Web

Transforming the visibility of one of the region's most important organisations.

A Common Problem

When Sheffield City Region’s Growth Hub invited us to tender for a new site, they were facing a number of issues. Their original site was difficult to update, not showing up in Google searches due to poor search engine optimisation and suffered from regular bugs and performance issues.

The team at The Growth Hub needed a website rethink, and despite some super-tight timescales, we got to work developing a new site from the ground up.

Expediting The Planning Process

The planning and design process for The Growth Hub’s new site was an intensive few weeks, but Ink & Water were up to the task. We quickly iterated over detailed documents, giving The Growth Hub team multiple design options, and the best possible structure and layout for a more functional, scalable website. Search Engine Optimisation was a priority from the outset. Ink & Water liaised with The Growth Hub’s copywriting team to put together a content strategy that would greatly improve upon their current site.

Smarter Interfaces

Using WordPress for content-management, we developed a site with intuitive controls for managing various types of content; coupled with one-to-one training, this allowed The Growth Hub team to take much greater control over their website than they had previously.

Sheffield City Region Growth Hub - Controls
Intuitive, visual drag-and-drop controls allow staff at The Growth Hub to put together new page layouts with ease.

Growing Traffic Through Search Engine Optimisation

Having a rational content strategy in place, and following development best practices to build a fast, secure and responsive website were all crucial aspects of improving search engine optimisation for The Growth Hub. Thanks to our search engine optimisation work, The Growth Hub saw four times more traffic after the new site launched, with visits continuing to increase. The site also sees far greater user engagement than before, with a rapidly expanding event listing section and business directory populated by site users.

Scaling Up

The Growth Hub is also geared up for further gains in traffic. Deployed onto our managed hosting environment, the site features a content-delivery network (CDN), SSL, HTTP/2 and advanced caching, providing ample capacity to serve up the site quickly for large numbers of users.

View the site: www.scrgrowthhub.co.uk

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