Acclaro Advisory
A sustainable multisite for a rapidly expanding sustainability consultancy
Project overview
In 2022, we worked with UK sustainability consultancy Acclaro Advisory, to create a brand new sustainable multisite that reflected their rapid expansion in recent years.
Very much in line with our work, Acclaro Advisory work with forward thinking organisations, supporting them to achieve zero carbon and positive social impact.
With an aligned vision of a more sustainable future, of course they wanted their new website to reflect this, so we were the perfect partners for this project!
Features
- Accessible multisite
- Insightly CRM integration
- Brand consistency
- Custom Event post management
0.21g
Homepage CO2 per view
100%
Homepage Lighthouse Performance score
100%
Homepage Lighthouse Accessibility score
Discovering the need for a multisite
We began with our in-depth Discovery session with the Acclaro Advisory team, during which we identified three distinct audiences for their work – their clients (prospective and existing), employees (prospective and existing) and others (collaborators, researchers, practitioners, the press and media).
Working together to developing these personas in detail helped us to create a user experience that would provide everyone with what they need when they arrive at the new website.
A key realisation that came out from this discovery session was around the three main services that Acclaro Advisory clients come to the website for:
- Responsible Business
- Zero Carbon
- The Sustainable Facilities Management Index (SFMI)
Developing a deeper understanding of the SFMI highlighted for us what a valuable, important product this is, and led to the decision that this service needed its own website. This would allow for content about and for the SFMI room to grow, with clear user journeys for this specific audience of facilities management providers and their supporters.
A sustainable multisite to match their mission
Although the original website was built using WordPress, it had been built using a theme modification and was not custom designed with Acclaro Advisory’s audience’s needs in mind.
We designed and built a brand new custom WordPress multisite, using our lightweight, performant Granola framework, which allowed us to greatly reduce the carbon carbon emissions, improve performance and create an all round excellent user experience for all audiences.
As a result of our work, we saw significant improvements across the board in accessibility, performance and more.
These improvements included a massive 93% decrease in carbon emissions on the image-heavy team page and a 37% increase in clarity for the streamlined new homepage design.
Keeping a consistent brand experience
To ensure the new multisite offers a consistent brand experience, we made sure to design both the new sites following existing brand guidelines, to ensure that the core theme remained the same.
Although the design is exactly the same for each site, we used different brand colours to differentiate the SFMI service.
Keeeping a consistent core theme not only keeps the branding recognisable, it also provides the Acclaro Advisory team with a cost-effective way of keeping both sites up to date in the future.
Integrating an existing client database
To make it easy for the team to keep their existing audiences up to date with relevant news and events, we integrated their Insightly CRM into the new multisite.
This gives the team quick access to their dedicated clients within the WordPress CMS.
Custom post management to keep content up to date
With so much content to keep on top of, we wanted to make it easy for the team to ensure their dynamic content always remains relevant and up to date.
To this end, we created a custom cron script for the New & Events pages, which automatically moves posts from the Future Events category to the Past Events category once the event has passed.
A sustainable site for a sustainable future
We’re really pleased to have been able to create this high performing, highly accessible, super sustainable multisite that reflects Acclaro’s increased growth without increasing their impact on the planet.
We’re so delighted with our new website and the Wholegrain team were a delight to work with! We’re looking forward to phase 2 :-)