Case Study: A website for the Winter Solstice Nude Charity Swim
What to do when you need a revamped website in a tight timeframe – and don’t know where to start? Come to Newcast.
Recently, Newcast was engaged by the Winter Solstice Nude Charity Swim, an organisation that runs an annual event on the Winter Solstice where a bunch of people jump into the icy cold waters of Lake Burley Griffen to raise awareness and funds for mental health.
Their previous website was old and outdated – it's functionality was still okay, but the design itself was out-of-date and, more importantly, really difficult to configure or change anything without asking the web developers to go in and change the content for $500/hour.
This is one trick that lots of web development companies do to ensure you keep coming back to them to make changes and fixes, and ultimately, pay way more money. By making the websites quite confusing in the backend, you will have no idea how to even approach it, so you become dependant on the web developers.
The charity approached us with the need for changes to their site to be made – and we took one look at it, and encouraged them to rebuild the website from scratch. We wanted to create something for them, that they could login to themselves and make changes when they needed.
The website they needed really only consisted of a couple of pages with imagery and text, and a portal for being able to contribute donations via credit card and PayPal – the only real changes are annually, updating the photo gallery, the sponsors, and the dates.
So we suggested building a Squarespace website, because from our experience, it is the most user-friendly when it comes to construction and editing.
With a tight time frame, and the need for our client to be able to edit and change things themselves, we thought this would be the best platform to choose.
Having all the content on hand from the get go was great, as the images, text content and branding were already web-optimised – it was simply a matter of placing it all into a new site, and playing around with the design to achieve the right look for WSNC.
Setting up Paypal and credit card payments was really straightforward, and the most important aspect. Once it was live, we were able to track and analyse the numbers of people coming to the site.
The Commerce tab really helps to keep a track of people's payments and their details.
All in all, the website was a huge success for the charity.
$16,500! That's how much money the swim has raised for @Lifeline_ACT Lifeline Canberra this year. Thank you to everyone who donated! Also thanks to our sponsors Old Canberra Inn, @newcaststudios and Williams Crossing Bicycle Club for their support.
— Winter Solstice Nude Charity Swim (@WSNCSwim) June 24, 2020
They told us that "we’re approaching 20k donations for the swim which is a great result given this year’s restrictions, which I think is partly a result of how well the website turned out and how easy it is to donate."
A win for everyone – and we're super proud to have been able to support these guys with raising money this year! See the website for yourself.