First up, like all great projects, came user research led by Robin Bilney – the Digital Communications Manager at The Royal Parks. He surveyed user satisfaction levels and also staff at The Royal Parks in order to better understand how the website could help both parties.

Using these insights, as well as the internal goals, 4 key project milestones were decided:

1. Initial designs that fit with The Royal Parks’ new brand guidelines
2. Produce over 120 pages of new content
3. Development stages in-line with the defined specification
4. Successful launch of the new website

Squiz worked closely with The Royal Parks to turn a flat PSD design into full HTML page templates. With a new template in place, Squiz began migrating content from the old CMS to build up the look and feel of the new site on Squiz Matrix CMS. We also used the functional specification to build enhanced features that included event calendars and map integration to increase functionality.

As ensuring ease of access was important, much work was done to make user journeys as simple and engaging as possible, no matter the device. The first step in creating this new responsive design was to make sure that only the necessary pages, images and documents came with the site, before ensuring that the new pages were technically capable of delivering the responsive design.