At the end of 2024 we launched a digital creative community site for StoriPowys and Powys Council. The site replaced their previous SquareSpace info site with a new bilingual (English and Welsh) WordPress site, complete with events calendar, and community features. The project was led by our friends at Ammba who were helping StoriPowys with a variety of projects and who brought us onboard for the website design and build.

The bilingual requirements for this site were quite different to your “typical” multilingual WordPress. For a start, when you’re working on a Welsh site, the translation is a legal requirement – it’s not just a business trying to appeal to overseas markets. But to take things a step further – or rather, quite a few steps further – we were asking members of the public to contribute content, and that needed to be contributed in English and Welsh. This meant every user journey needed to guide people through 2 steps – adding their event in English and Welsh, or adding their Profile in Welsh and English.

I just wanted to take the opportunity to say a big thank you for the work you have delivered for the new StoriPowys website platforms […] The website looks great and I’m incredibly pleased with the platforms and the quality of the design and functionality. I hope that you are too.

Emily Bartlett

Project Manager – Arts and Culture

To suit budgets, we were using various leading platforms such as The Events Calendar and WPML (for the multilingual aspect of the site) – but the community requirements really pushed these plugins to their limits so we had to do lots of custom work around the user journeys to make sure things were smooth and easy for visitors. There is a community extension for The Events Calendar, but it doesn’t play nicely with WPML (at the time of writing this), so to let people submit events in 2 languages took a bit of magic behind the scenes.

For the profiles and the directory of creatives, allowing people working in the creative sector to seek out collaborators and peers, we opted away from using any plugins (apart from Advanced Custom Fields) and built the directory ourselves using WordPress core functionality so as to avoid the dependencies and code bloat that you can face when you throw too many plugins at a single site. We carefully planned the filter requirements with the team and everything that should show on the profiles, giving careful thought to what should be most prominent.

StoriPowys website designs

We also designed and built the Creative Toolkit – a section of the site which allows the StoriPowys team to sign post members of their community to useful tools and resources both on and off their site.

Overall with so many different sections to the site there was a lot of design work. We were given a lovely but somewhat limited colour palette, so we worked hard to make this work well across all aspects of the site, giving it variety and depth without straying from the brand guidelines.

Whilst Ammba worked hard helping the Powys team populate all the pages they needed to ahead of launch, with tightly crunched timescales, we prepared the launch strategy which ensured a smooth transition from the old site to the new over the Christmas break.