One Home
A source of truth helping UK households adapt to a low cost, low carbon lifestyle.
Project overview
As we increasingly feel the impact of climate change, social enterprise One Home’s mission is to help people prepare for the changes and uncertainty ahead. They achieve this by helping UK households adapt to a low cost, low carbon lifestyle. By providing practical information and advice, they help to improve people’s lives while saving them money and reducing carbon emissions.
Very much aligned with our people and planet focused mission, it was a pleasure to design and develop this low carbon website for One Home, creating a platform that acts as a source of truth helping UK households adapt to a low cost, low carbon lifestyle.
Features
- Full brand refresh
- Visual identity guidelines
- Mobile-optimised site design
- Content migration
- CMS training
0.16g
CO2 per homepage view
98%
Homepage Lighthouse Performance Score
98%
Homepage Lighthouse Accessibility Score
Brand refresh
When we started working with the team at One Home, the initial brief was to help them overhaul their on and offline brand identity, and create a website experience that would reflect their expertise – positioning them as to ‘go-to’ expert organisation for easy-to-understand carbon saving advice and information.
We took a discovery-first approach, beginning with an internal stakeholder survey and a separate newsletter survey to find out what One Home wanted to achieve, and what their current site visitors needed from the new site.
The results showed that One Home wanted to host a wealth of information, making it engaging and easy to understand. Their audience wanted the same.
Developing a strong visual identity
The new visual identity needed to be dynamic and engaging for One Home’s message to reach more of its intended audience. Starting with a visual representation of ‘home’ as central to the new logo, the updated visual identity, developed by our designer Dom, uses warm, inviting colours and geometrical shapes.
This design makes for a consistent but also flexible visual language, that can be used across all of One Home’s marketing content, with the shapes – a circle, half circle and quarter circle – being arranged across the new website to create areas of interest.
To ensure that all those creating content for One Home can achieve consistency not only of the visual identity but also the personality and messaging, we developed bespoke brand guidelines for the team, which include logo and colour application, as well as tone of voice guidelines for the identified brand archetypes that came out of our discovery session.
Mobile-optimised site design
When reviewing One Home’s website survey and statistics, it was clear that more people were viewing their site on mobile, rather than desktop.
Although all of our websites are optimised for mobile, given the unexpectedly high number of mobile visitors to the site, we made sure that mobile visitors were prioritised for this project. The new design is therefore really focused on providing a really good reading experience on mobile, that would also read well on desktop.
The final design is an editorial style layout, which works well with One Home’s content.
Content migration
The previous website was built on Joomla CMS and the One Home team was keen to move to WordPress, to give them more control over their content.
This meant that the approximately 300 articles on the previous website needed to be migrated across to the new website. We achieved this with a custom script.
Before launching the website, we also provided comprehensive CMS training to ensure the team would be confident in using the new system to update their website content.
A sustainable site for a sustainable life
It was a pleasure to help the One Home team create a website that matches their mission, ensuring that while the new branding offers bold visuals, it is also kinder to the environment – now producing only 0.15g of CO² per page view compared to 1.24g, a reduction of 87%, as calculated on our Website Carbon Calculator.
By following best practice in accessibility, user experience and sustainability, we were able to make the Homepage 81% lighter than it was before, which also reduced the page loading time by 80% (6.7s to 1.3s), even though we increased the amount of content.
The end result is a fast loading, warm and engaging website with a consistent look and feel, which invites One Home’s UK audience to feel ‘at home’ on their site.
This encourages people to spend more time exploring One Home’s advice on how to save carbon, save money and ultimately, take effective individual climate action towards a better future for a better planet.
