Norwich Business Improvement District (BID) is run by local businesses for local businesses.

Their main aim is to position Norwich as one of Britain’s leading cities by making a positive impact on the city centre and its businesses.

Bounce rate improved by 39%
Average time spent on site increased by 56%
Pages viewed increased by 63%

Bigfork were appointed to design the new Norwich BID website with the main aim of improving engagement rates. The website’s goals are to engage with levy payers and promote the activities and achievements of Norwich BID.
The key issues identified were:

• Low engagement rates
• It was difficult to navigate through the website as it had many pages and lacked a logical structure
• Content was very text heavy and hard to digest

The engagement rates were particularly bad for mobile users on the old website. Mobile users account for 40% of the traffic, so it was extremely important that we designed the website to work well on mobile, using a mobile-first responsive design. 

To increase engagement we also needed to redesign and rewrite many of the content pages. The old pages consisted of mainly text and our design aim was to add more visual appeal and make the content easier to digest.

Using Google Analytics we could see we were losing a lot of people on the home page of the old site, which had a very cluttered design. As the main landing page for the majority of website visitors, the home page needed to not only have a strong visual appeal but also tell them clearly what Norwich BID does and encourage them to explore further. 

Although the website content was rich, the site was tricky to navigate and the overall experience of using the site needed to be more user-friendly.

Based on our findings we designed the new website with an improved user experience in mind. This included simplifying the navigation menu, introducing navigation aids including breadcrumbs and search suggestions, and including large image-led feature boxes throughout the site to drive people to related content. The website was also restructured into clear sections such as “what we do” and “what’s on”, making navigation more intuitive.