Website for the Master, Wardens and Assistants of the Guild Fraternity or Brotherhood of the most glorious and undivided Trinity and of St. Clement in the Parish of Deptford Strond
We undertook an extensive discovery and design process to deliver a website that met the various operational strands and business needs of Trinity House. These include automated notices to ships at sea, event promotion and charity support, and a shop selling lighthouse merchandise. We also built and manage a membership application for the Fraternity.
The Trinity House website helps the worlds oldest lighthouse authority deliver important services to mariners
With responsibility for the safety of ships and seafarers all day, every day, we think Trinity House is the most important organisation the British public have never heard of.
When we started finding out about them during the research phase of the project we were staggered by the range of things they did and intrigued by the nature of an organisation that dated back over 500 years.
To make navigation easy rather than an effort, we set about identifying the key site users by creating personas. Developing stand-ins for site users is something we do regularly but with Trinity House, the range of our writers was wonderfully extended. From mariners at sea to event bookers and ship owners to sea cadets, we created people from the marine world whose needs the Trinity House website had to meet.
Welcomed into the well-appointed rooms of Trinity House, the building, overlooking Tower Hill, we were presented with a bewildering array of services and a structure that could be traced back to the Royal Charter bestowed on Trinity House by Henry VIII in 1514.
At the same time as being steeped in history, Trinity House is a world leader in marine technology and sea-based information systems. On top of that, it's a lighthouse authority. A fraternity. A charity. An educator. An events business. A shop. And more.
Their existing web presence was doing a decent job of passing this complexity onto the user, without much reward for perseverance. Our job was to make what Trinity House does clear to anyone and to deliver their content, at times life-critical, to the right user groups.