GRASFI
Global Research Alliance For Sustainable Finance and Investment
We helped GRASFI with:
Wordpress Website Design and Build
How It Started…
GRASFI, the Global Research Alliance for Sustainable Finance and Investment, reached out to VVITCH Digital in need of website help. The U.K. charity had a website that had been patched together over the years in WordPress and was a bit of a mess (their words, not ours!).
They shared that the main function of their website is to promote their annual conference each year, but that it also needed to host research papers from past conferences and do a better job of advertising courses from their member universities to interested parties. We knew we could help — functionality and usability is our speciality after all.
A More Usable Website
GRASFI was hoping for a platform that would be easier for them to maintain, so we initially looked into moving them to Squarespace. It is simple and straightforward to use, which we knew their team needed. Thankfully, we always dig into all the needs of the site before we begin to build.
One of the very first steps of every website project is the requirements phase.
During this phase, we document every single page, functionality, feature and, app/integration that will be on the website.
It was at this stage that we realized some of the functionality needs that GRASFI had were simply not possible in Squarespace.
Specifically, the site needed to have more advanced search and filter features for their research papers. We also needed to support many different types of content, each with custom details that needed to be shared and managed differently.
Because of this, we came to the conclusion that the best course of action to meet the needs of GRASFI was to keep them on WordPress, but work to improve the functionality and experience for GRASFI and their members.
Completing the Site Build
Once we establish the functional requirements for a website and reach consensus with our client, we begin to build.
We used Elementor, an intuitive page builder for WordPress, to create more engaging page layouts that are easier for GRASFI to maintain. We also installed and configured any plug-ins that would be necessary to manage the site. Plug-Ins are often required with WordPress to achieve certain functionality, but they can also weigh down your site and make it work more slowly or introduce extra costs. Because of this, we always like to explore other solutions before adding unnecessary plug-ins.
With all of our new features and functionality in place, we then began the work of adding and importing new content, including research papers, lists of Board and Committee members, courses from member universities, and news posts.
Finally, we delivered training videos to help GRASFI’s team make changes in the future.
The end result is an easy-to-navigate website that makes promotes GRASFI’s conferences, member universities and research library.
