Objectives
the world's leading garden plant conservation and research charity and the home of the National Plant Collections
Plant Heritage's original site had grown unwieldy, they had limited CMS editing capabilities and a poor eCommerce experience. The site needed a re-vamp utilising the newly evolved brand, a simpler navigation experience for their senior audience and a more advanced plant collection search. The aim was to attract new members and encourage new donations to the organisation and showcase activity at a local and region level.
Solution
creating an open source CMS platform ensuring member engagement, global awareness and growth
The re-build of the website was critical to ensure NXT could deliver all the requirements scoped with the steering group and wider membership of Plant Heritage. Surveys and workshops were conducted to investigate the needs of the charity to ensure its new website was fit for purpose. There was a real requirement to support regional membership with access to the website features as well as create a single resource for access to the National Plants Collections.
The site needed to attract and retain members and support a fully end-to-end eCommerce solution and integration with internal management tools.
Visually we knew good quality large plant photos would make a real impact across the site, so we selected a family of beautiful close up photos taken by Plant Heritage and some of the members. The images worked perfectly as a backdrop but also which also tied in seamlessly with the brands colour palette.
Technical Features
- Umbraco content management system
- Customised membership packages
- Plant collection API search
- Ucommerce eCommerce platform
- PayPal / WorldPay Checkouts / GoCardless Direct Debits
- Google maps API
- Local groups management system
- Cloud hosting / support package
planting the seed for long
term growth
Using Umbraco as the platform, we setup templates that could be easily managed by admin and local groups. Local groups can manage their own pages as well as post events and news.
As part of the project we also created a shop built upon the Ucommerce platform, which in turn was integrated with PayPal and Worldpay for flexible payments that were familiar and simple to complete, as well as setting up GoCardless Membership fees via Direct Debit.
Solution
search the national plant collection
Showcasing the National Plant Collections® was a key part of the new site. We utilised an existing 3rd party API to pull through plant information into the collection search.
The results can be easily filtered by key words, plant types, season interest or by local groups and can be viewed as list or via Google maps showing the location of the plant. The details of each plant is pulled through showing descriptions, plant owners, the location of the plant as well as an extra large photo to really see the detail of the plant.
Result
The success of the project came with 85% increase in page views and 65% reduction in site bounce rate. conversions to direct debit have supported better cash-flow for the charity
Since the new site launched, press and member reactions have been extremely positive with a number of features in the horticultural press. The benefit of new platform and it's bespoke UX front-end has allowed modernisation and global access to a user-centric plant search system and local events calendar. With a flexible .NET CMS system, new products and events can easily be featured by the team. Since launch, site traffic statistics have seen significant increases in engagement and user activity across all sections of the site navigation.
NXT offered the charity a wealth of technical knowledge and experience and helped facilitate the team into a world class charity website. We and our members are delighted with the end product and are excited how we can expand our digital capabilities in the future. Website Steering Group Chair
