CCX

The Gregory Centre for Church Multiplication (CCX) supports leaders, church teams and dioceses across London, England and beyond as they multiply disciples, churches and networks.

Led by the Bishop of Islington, the Rt Revd Ric Thorpe, they equip and resource the Church to establish new churches and to help communities grow existing churches.

The Brief

CCX approached us to help improve their website journey, content clarity, branding and their LearnDash eLearning system. Over the years, the CCX organisation has grown in size and complexity of their offerings, and with it, the website needed to evolve too. It was in need of organisation, standardisation and a simplification of the user journey.

Our challenge came in three measures: to help the CCX team understand the advanced capabilities of LearnDash; to reorganise their content structure for better clarity – and to restructure their website to accommodate for growth while proposing a clearer user experience with a refreshed branding and brand expression.

Proof of Concept

When starting a new website or refreshing an existing one, it can be hard to exactly pin-point how this should look and feel from the very beginning. The same goes for its functionality: features often need exploring to assess their extent, limitations and compatibility with other key features.

Because of this, we’ve built a bespoke proof of concept system for CCX, aiming to extend LearnDash’s advanced features to fully meet CCX’s business logic, needs and expectations. During this phase, we worked closely with CCX to obtain a good, granular picture of what would be needed for the final build – while also helping CCX clarify some doubts and explore various alternatives.

This initial phase clarified valuable information for both CCX and the Kanuka Digital team, allowing us to accommodate for all the bespoke requirements that were collected.

A detailed discovery process is almost always worth investing in, to ensure the project is fully understood, scoped and planned. Building a proof of concept takes the project a step forward by laying the groundwork for the future build, allowing for exploration, testing and correct technical planning.

User Interface Redesign

The design phase was a fantastic opportunity to bring all of the ideas into visualised prototypes that define the final user experience for all the features that need to be built; while restructuring the user interface functionally to highlight key areas of the website, make call to actions more prominent and refresh the overall look and feel with close attention to CCX’s branding rules.

CCX already had great branding and numerous assets we could start from, so the real challenge was reorganising the website’s structure to favour a better content hierarchy, promoting typographical clarity and eliminating bottlenecks in the user journey to smoothen the final experience.

The website interface was improved, reviewing key areas of the website such as the main navigation, the footer structure and the structuring of the content area. Finally, we designed all the key pages and their visual variations using a modular approach which favours using reusable highly-customisable reusable components.

This approach produced a highly consistent design with a clear typographical and information hierarchy that promotes clarity, readability and ease of navigation.

LearnDash Customisations

With eLearning being a central aspect of the new CCX website, we chose LearnDash and some of its official add-ons as the foundation for our work. After exploring various options during the proof of concept phase, we settled on a hybrid approach which makes use of extensions such as ProPanel, LearnDash Notes and LearnDash Notifications – paired with bespoke solutions delivered directly by us to fine-tune the LMS into meeting the CCX business requirements exactly.

We’ve extended the logic that manages course access rules; completely redesigned the course templates to meet CCX’s branding requirements, and modified the built-in focus-mode experience to meet CCX’s requirements.

The final build allows for the creation of highly customisable courses, which make use of conditional blocks and conditional access rules to allow Course Leaders to lead their courses and manage their enlistees with total freedom and flexibility.

Modular Content Building

At Kanuka Digital, we use a bespoke framework that allows us to build advanced, highly customisable reusable blocks that are compatible with WordPress’ Gutenberg editor.

Once these blocks are built, CCX staff can use the visual editor in the WordPress back-end to easily create or edit pages of their website, with complete freedom to tweak the appearance, functionality and data used for each component.

This allows CCX to fully control their website’s looks and functionality without the need of advanced technical knowledge, coding basics, or breaking the interface.

Our reusable modular blocks are built to ensure consistency, reliability and usability and modularity.

Resources & Events

The original CCX website came with hundreds of published videos, articles and stories by numerous contributors. However, the business had grown out of the way this content was originally organised – leading to the need of a massive reorganisation of their content.

Moreover, a key part of the business is centered around the events that are published via the website, and that are also available via third-party aggregators.

We helped CCX by rearranging their content structure into clearly defined content types, and by setting up the navigation system to explore the sub-structures of the content (custom taxonomies and categories configuration with easy navigation to each content category).

Meanwhile, the events system was reorganised to meet their current modus operandi while bringing in much needed improvements to the overall experience. We used a highly-customisable event management system and rebuilt its templates to allow a seamless integration with our blocks-based system, and added bespoke and intuitive functionalities that allow CCX to fully control the user experience related to events.

Improved Search Functionality

CCX has a wide range of user types, from those new to CCX to those who know exactly what they are looking for. The search functionality needed to accommodate both.

CCX’s legacy search engine, while functional, needed improvement. As part of our proposed restructuring of the main navigation – which also reshaped the way the search call to action was visually presented – we’ve suggested using a more advanced search engine that would allow users to see dynamic results as they type.

To make this possible, we leveraged Algolia’s indexing and search systems and their integration with WordPress. We then proceeded to customise the integration, rewriting key templates to match the CCX branding and by adding bespoke rules to the indexing mechanism to match our expected logic.

This was an extensive piece of work, but was critical in providing a solid data foundation on which the CCX team could build in years to come.

CiviCRM Integration

We proudly partnered with Third Sector Design to allow WordPress to integrate with CCX’s broader CRM system. This allowed data coming from WordPress and/or our modular blocks to be seamlessly funnelled into the CRM.

We’ve also provided options and support to ensure that the forms used to capture the data are fully customisable and consistent with the overall user interface.

Kanuka Digital helped CCX develop a new website for delivering resources and training content to a very specific brief. From scoping to design, development to launch, they were fantastic to work with. We’re thrilled with the platform we now have, and the manner in which their whole team looked after the project. We would highly recommend working with them.

David Cornish
CCX

Got a project in mind?

We’re a straight-talking web development agency that excel in the design and development of eCommerce stores, learning solutions and lead generation websites.

50+ team of designers, developers and creative strategists with a passion for all things digital
Proven experience growing eCommerce companies from startups through to FTSE 100s
Partnered with data-driven marketing specialists Proof3 and Adobe Commerce Gold Partners iWeb for a holistic approach to digital growth.