Brighton & Hove Food Partnership (BHFP) is an award-winning not-for-profit working towards a goal of healthy, sustainable and fair food for everyone in the city. Started by local residents in 2003, it went on to lead Brighton & Hove’s bid to become the first place in the UK to earn Gold Sustainable Food Place status - and its work now runs right across the spectrum, from cookery classes and community gardens to surplus food redistribution, emergency food support, volunteering and city-wide food policy.
That breadth is BHFP’s great strength. It was also the central puzzle of their new website. Following a recent brand refresh, they came to Bozboz with a site that no longer looked or worked like the organisation it represented.
On any given day, very different people arrive on the BHFP website. Someone booking a cookery class at the Community Kitchen. Someone looking to volunteer, donate or support the cause. A referrer - a GP, social prescriber or Citizens Advice adviser - checking which food banks are open and when. And someone in a difficult moment, trying to find emergency food quickly. The same site has to serve all of them well.
The previous site made that hard. It had grown organically over many years, and it showed: sprawling navigation, page after page of dense text, and a look that had drifted away from the warmth of the refreshed brand. Even small content updates meant going back to developers, which slowed the team down. And the emergency food section - one of the most heavily used parts of the site, relied on by people in distress and the professionals who support them - needed to be calmer, clearer and easier to use under pressure, including for people who don’t read English as a first language.
We started with a thorough discovery phase, interviewing key stakeholders across several sessions to build a genuine understanding of the organisation and what it needed most.
From there, WordPress was chosen as the best fit for the new site. BHFP needed the flexibility to build pages, swap imagery and update messaging themselves, rather than raising a request every time something needed to change.
In the design phase, we worked out which block components the site would need, and applied their new branding creatively across the new library.
Then came front-end and back-end development, building out a site with:
BHFP were keen to keep the booking, voucher and donation tools they already rely on - SimpleTix, SquareUp and JustGiving - so we integrated cleanly around them and made each one easier to find. We connected Gravity Forms to Airtable and Brevo for the organisation’s many enquiry and sign-up forms, added accessibility controls and a clear accessibility statement, set up GA4 through Google Tag Manager, and moved hosting to WPEngine. We then trained the team to manage it all themselves.
The new site does what BHFP set out to do. The refreshed brand now runs consistently from the homepage to their about section, and the full breadth of the organisation - classes, gardens, projects, policy and emergency support - feels more connected. The team can update their own website without waiting on anyone. Class listings are easy to book. And someone who needs emergency food, they can easily find their nearest provision. Importantly, the team are proud of their new site.
The response from BHFP said the rest:
“The feedback has been glowing from basically everyone, and the team are so happy and proud of how it looks. The whole process felt really calm and well managed throughout, which made a big impact too.”
- Jess Crocker, Deputy CEO, Brighton & Hove Food Partnership
We will continue working with BHFP as their support partner and are now underway on their next project together, the Food Use Confidence Dial. Stay Tuned!
Our collective team has a wealth of experience across the full spectrum of digital agency services including brand, web, Ecommerce, CRM, strategy and marketing. If you’d like advice about any aspect of your digital touchpoints, drop us a line today.
