The Brief

The Bridport Prize is an international creative writing competition. Established in 1973, the competition is Bridport Arts Centre’s flagship project, with categories in poetry, short stories, novel writing and flash fiction. The Bridport Prize Team approached CuCo to develop an all-new website as well as a fresh brand identity. Attracting thousands of entries each year, from all corners of the globe, the website needed to be able to handle a higher volume of traffic – particularly in the last 24 hours before the competition deadline. The existing Bridport Prize website was built on Drupal and wasn’t mobile-friendly, whilst market research showed a pronounced move in the competition’s user preference from desktop to mobile devices. We needed to create a fully-responsive website worthy of one of the world’s biggest global literature competitions.

The Solution

CuCo delivered an all-new website for The Bridport Prize.The process began with a full review of the existing Bridport Prize website’s structure and UX.

As well as having a far more friendly and accessible feel, the site now offers a much cleaner navigation and the pages are far less cluttered. With a streamlined UX in place the next phase would be to consider accessibility, an important factor with such a diverse audience. The Digital Team really wanted to bring a sense of literature to the website, in particular a design that would resonate with writers, poets etc and we wanted to offer a site that represents what they do. The page designs therefore make use of paper, alongside a pen – the essential tool for any creative writer composing ideas. The style is a great deal more contemporary with stronger visuals now used throughout the site. The website also includes complex eCommerce functionality, newsletter sign-up and an all-new dynamic countdown. Entrants are able to create an account, upload their story or poem and the Bridport Prize Team can then download all entries from the site once the competition closes.

Results

CuCo were challenged with incredibly tight deadlines, but as always, we delivered, with the new responsive eCommerce website designed and developed within 6 weeks… an amazing effort (well done Digital Team!).

Users are already reporting to The Bridport Prize just how much easier the website is to navigate and how easily then can upload their work thanks to the improved UX. All the signs are in place to ensure The Bridport Prize goes from strength to strength as one of the leading competitions around the globe for creative writers.

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Written by

Claudia Pharoah

Date

23.02.18

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