Context
The Carbon Trust works with UK business and the public sector to cut carbon emissions and develop commercial low carbon technologies – creating business-focused solutions to carbon emission reduction on energy efficiency, carbon management, and investment.
Target audiences for its website include SMEs looking for energy savings; corporate and public sector organisations considering carbon management; companies looking for research & development help or incubator support to develop low carbon technologies and individuals including investors, consultants, journalists, trade associations and the general public.
Challenge
Our primary challenge was to consolidate the disparate sites that constituted the Carbon Trust’s web offering into a single portal. We set out to make information, products and services more accessible – and to make the site more customer-centric. We were also tasked with enhancing the Carbon Trust brand identity online and looking for ways to cross-sell events and publications. The technical infrastructure of the existing Carbon Trust website was inadequate, with only partial search facilities, even though it carries extensive information resources – including the UK’s biggest online collection of free independent energy publications.
Solution
Information architecture and taxonomy was fundamental to our solution. We focused on identifying, engaging and retaining target audiences before creating a single portal – segmenting information and achieving clarity in the navigational structure of a site that addresses audience groups with varying needs. Our design studio strengthened the Carbon Trust brand online: introducing more imagery and creating a common design language that presents information in a unified design framework.
We upgraded the technical infrastructure, building a resilient and scalable web platform that is fully content-managed to enable the Carbon Trust’s authors to create web pages in-house. We implemented powerful Ultraseek search facilities for users to access services and information easily. Search also plays a vital role in addressing the Carbon Trust’s business objectives: we reconfigured Ultraseek to enable the Carbon Trust to cross-sell related products and services, creating a search tool that allows web authors to find and publish links to content from other site areas relevant to the page they are creating.
Outcome
The new site has already played a key role in supporting summer marketing campaigns. The new design is cleaner and fresher, building the Carbon Trust brand online. Usability and accessibility is significantly improved. The new technical infrastructure is robust and reliable, allowing for future expansion. "cScape has provided us with a strong technical structure and flexible, engaging design that will enable us to expand and enhance the website over the next period of its development,” said Kate Smyth, Carbon Trust web manager.