Overview
SPAN Arts is a charity dedicated to “Arts as Social Change in Rural Wales,” working to support artists, encourage community engagement and champion cultural access in the region.
span-arts.org.uk
Black Cherry Technologies was commissioned to rebuild SPAN Arts’ online presence in order to reflect their mission, improve user-engagement, streamline content management and support future growth.
Objectives
- Create a highly accessible, bilingual (English/Cymraeg) WordPress site that reflects SPAN Arts’ rural-Welsh identity and community-focus.
- Deliver a modular content structure to allow SPAN Arts’ team to easily publish news, events, artist profiles and bookings without ongoing developer dependency.
- Improve performance, accessibility (WCAG compliance), mobile responsiveness, and SEO-readiness to support growth in both local and international reach.
- Integrate donation functionality and build pathways to increase engagement and support for the charity’s work.
- Facilitate user journeys for different personas: artists seeking support, community members looking to attend events, donors and volunteers.
Approach & Implementation
Conducted a discovery phase, including stakeholder interviews and audit of the previous site, to define requirements and personas.
Designed a clean, modern visual language rooted in SPAN Arts’ identity: open spaces, rural imagery, and creative-arts motifs, combined with a clear navigation structure for the multiple user pathways.
Built the site on WordPress with a custom theme and flexible block-based layout system (Gutenberg or similar), enabling SPAN Arts’ internal team to easily assemble new pages (such as artist profiles, event listings, news posts) without coding.
Ensured full bilingual support (English / Welsh) with proper language switcher, translated UI elements, and retained equal usability across both languages.
Implemented event-listing capabilities, newsletter sign-up, and donation integration (via charity-friendly plugin or custom integration), ensuring a seamless and secure user experience.
Optimised site speed (image-optimisation, caching, minimal third-party bloat), and ensured responsive design for mobile and tablet users.
Set up basic SEO-foundation (clean URLs, metadata, sitemap, schema markup) to help SPAN Arts reach new audiences.
Provided training and documentation for SPAN Arts’ internal team to manage content, publish updates and roll out future sections independently.
Task
WordPress Website
- StrategyWordpress
- DesignWordpress Custom Theme Development
- ClientSPAN Arts
