The Biodiversity Consultancy

For the new website, the challenge was to create a digital experience that reflected this balance. TBC needed to feel credible and established enough to operate confidently within the corporate world, while retaining a strong connection to the natural environment at the heart of their work.

The result is a website that brings these two worlds together through a structured, contemporary visual language, combining the clarity and precision of a corporate consultancy with more expressive visual elements inspired by nature.

For over 15 years they have been the pathfinders for those who want to do better for people and planet, laying a foundation for organisations that match purpose with practice to effectively manage biodiversity risk and find the opportunities for lasting, positive outcomes for the environment.

The Biodiversity Consultantcy approached us because their current website had never been intended to handle the large amount of content that it grew to have and this was causing them several frustrating issues:

• Poor discoverability of content, especially key resources and documents
• A challenging and complex service offering that spans multiple sectors and industries offering
• Confusing information architecture that was never intended to hold so much information
• A lack of design flexibility and components making content updates challenging and time consuming
• Low search engine visibility
• A none enterprise level CMS meaning poor performance and accessibility scoring
• Inconsistent visual styles
• Ineffective site search further contributing to discoverability challenges

To deliver best in class content management for a site of this size TYPO3 was an easy choice, it’s hierarchical file and folder structure combined with its powerful component based page builder and well organised record based content allows us to plan and create an enterprise level website that holds a vast library of content whilst ensuring it is easy to browse.

We held a series of discovery workshops to ensure we understood The Biodiversity Consultantcy offering and fed this into every stage of the new website’s development.

A key area of focus during the project was the importance of redefining TBC’s complex offering and extracting it down into a digital first “at a glance” hierarchy without over simplifying the content.

We created low fidelity wireframes to quickly explore content hierarchy options and to also run through user journeys to ensure content was found where expected whilst still ensuring brand messaging could be incorporated into a user’s experience of the website. Using wireframes in this way allowed us to plan a site structure that served varying audience types dependant on the level of information they required. Higher level pages keep content broader and less detailed but users can delve deeper into the site ending on highly detailed and often technical content when required. 

The website is entirely editable using the enterprise level CMS, TYPO3. It’s important that TBC can easily update content without the need to keep asking us for help. This is especially true with a website that has ever changing priorities and includes such a large collection of news,resources, projects, and a sizable team.

A powerful site wide search enables content to be searched and filtered to guide users to their desired content with minimal effort.

Website performance is really important to us. By using clean, semantic and fast loading code, the website is well optimised for search engines and to improve the load times for users. The website currently scores 100 out of 100 on Google’s page speed insight tool Lighthouse which analyses various factors including performance, accessibility, best practices & search engine optimisation.

View The Biodiversity Consultancy website