Promoting ethical investments
Ekopia Resource Exchange Limited is a community benefit co-operative which raises funds to support local community enterprises. Their services include providing ethical and ecological community investment, with past and present investments including affordable housing, a renewable wind park, a wholefoods store and a local currency scheme.
The Brief:
Ekopia sought a new, modern design that was engaging to visitors, and highlighted their aims and their key projects.
The Solution:
A custom build in order to minimise bloat and serve only what was needed as well as including compressed and optimised images, the site was built with user experience in mind.
Navigation remains clear and accessible with a sticky header, key navigation in the footer and full site menu in the sidebar of all internal pages.
The main call-to-action leads visitors to the ‘looking to invest?’ page, which provides a summary of investment opportunities for visitors looking to make an investment.
Headlines throughout the home-page help define Ekopia while leading visitors to areas of interest. Dynamic content is provided through the Twitter and news feeds, while the ‘our team’ section provides faces to those behind the scenes at Ekopia, helping to humanise the co-operative and build trust.
Future development will include a calendar and payment integrated booking system for a social enterprise hub.
The site was developed on the front-end with HTML5, CSS3, and jQuery (for navigation and the sticky header), integrated with WordPress. The workflow was powered by Gulp which provided SCSS preprocessing as well as image optimisation.
Main Features:
This project involved:
- Custom WordPress theme development
- Inclusion of many custom widgetised areas throughout the homepage and sidebar
- Custom latest news functionality
- Integration of SSL
- Responsive design