Youth nature programme website for Wild Youth in the Belfast Hills
Wild Youth is a joint project between Ulster Wildlife and Belfast Hills Partnership, delivering nature-based programmes that improve young people's wellbeing and employability. We built them a warm, image-led website that gets young people, parents and teachers to the right programme quickly.
Wild Youth in numbers
The challenge: two charities, three audiences
Two parent charities, two sets of branding, six programmes and three audiences who want completely different things.
Wild Youth brings Ulster Wildlife and Belfast Hills Partnership together under a single banner, which makes for a tricky brief before a line of copy is written.
The three audiences are the hard part. The young people themselves, the parents and carers signing them up, and the teachers and youth workers booking a whole group at once, all arriving at the same pages wanting different answers.
Charity budgets set the rest of the constraints. There was no room for licence fees eating into programme funding and no prospect of a developer being on hand every time a date moved, so whatever we built had to be run entirely by staff across two organisations.
Our approach: lead with the programmes
Young, Wild & Well runs nature-based programmes that build confidence, skills and employability in and around the Belfast Hills.
We built a site that leads with photography of the programmes actually happening. Real young people in the Belfast Hills, cooking on campfires and working together, does more for sign-ups than any amount of copy about wellbeing outcomes.
Each of the six programmes gets its own page with its age range, format and commitment stated plainly up front, so a 17 year old looking at Belfast Hills Explorers and an 18 to 25 year old considering the Trainee Rangers placement both know within seconds whether it is for them.
Accessibility mattered more than usual here. Some programmes run with schools and special education groups, so the person booking is often reading on behalf of somebody with specific needs and has to be able to find that detail without having to ask for it.
What we built for Wild Youth
Six programmes, three audiences and two parent charities, which is a lot to reconcile before a line of copy is written.
Six programme pages
Each programme with its age range, format and commitment stated up front, so anybody knows within seconds whether it is meant for them.
Written for three audiences
Young people, parents and carers, and the teachers and youth workers booking a whole group, all served from the same pages.
Dual-charity branding
Ulster Wildlife and Belfast Hills Partnership presented under one banner without either of them being buried.
Programme photography
Real young people in the Belfast Hills rather than stock imagery, which does more for sign-ups than any amount of copy about outcomes.
Enquiry routes
Ways to get in touch that suit a parent, a young person and a group leader, instead of one form for all three.
Run by staff
Programme details, dates and photography are updated by staff across both organisations, with no developer and no licence cost.
The Tech-Spec
Built on WordPress so that staff across two organisations can update programme details, dates and photography themselves, with no developer involvement and no licence cost eating into a charity's budget.
HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript
WordPress, Elementor
Programme templates, enquiry forms, staff profiles, dual-charity branding, Cloudflare CDN, Google Analytics
Services on this project
Most of our clients use more than one.
Entry-level websites
A smaller, fixed-price start for a newer business that still has to be built properly, and can be grown into a full build later.
→ 02Maintenance
Updates, backups and security handled quietly in the background, so problems are dealt with before they become urgent.
→More work
A few of the other projects we have built.
