Digital You CIC is a community interest company working on digital inclusion across the North East. Sharon Sanders set the organisation up to help people who are shut out by technology — older residents, people on low incomes, and those supported by local charities and health services. The organisation needed its first proper website.
The site had two jobs to do at once. It had to explain the work plainly to the people and community groups being supported, and it had to stand up as a credibility asset when Sharon approaches councils, NHS teams, GP practices, housing associations and other VCSE organisations — including when a funder or grant panel looks the organisation up. That meant the tone had to stay warm and readable while the structure, legal pages and accessibility standard had to be genuinely solid.
Delivered as a fixed-scope WordPress and Elementor Pro build covering twelve pages, a blog and a custom 404, with a small monthly care plan for ongoing updates and maintenance after handover.
| Problem | Solution Implemented |
|---|---|
| A brand new organisation with no website, needing instant credibility with funders and public-sector partners | Built a twelve-page site with a clear story, service structure, mission and values, team and resources sections, plus a blog and a branded 404, so the organisation reads as established rather than provisional. |
| Page-builder sites are usually unmaintainable — styling scattered across a database with no history | Put the whole build under source control: 26 WP-CLI PHP scripts author the Elementor page data, and roughly 3,100 lines of CSS live in 34 versioned mu-plugin loaders. Every stylesheet is scoped to its own page so nothing leaks between templates. 59 commits of history. |
| An accessibility-focused CIC needs a genuinely accessible site, not a badge | Built and audited to WCAG 2.1 AA with axe run across all pages at desktop and mobile widths, returning zero violations. Full responsive pass at 1440, 768 and 390 with no overflow and no broken images, plus a link crawl showing no broken links across 86 checked. |
| Cookie consent on most small sites is decorative — the tracking fires anyway | Verified consent behaviour empirically with Playwright across three fresh browser contexts — no interaction, Deny, and Accept All — confirming analytics cookies are only set after consent is given. |
| Slow first load on shared hosting, with the design leaning on large photographic heroes | Wrote a dedicated performance layer that cut unused font families down to a single trimmed request, disabled unused block CSS, and preloads the hero image per page since the hero is the largest paint element. Homepage largest contentful paint dropped from 3.9s to 1.9s. |
| In an NHS and vulnerable-people context, an invented statistic or claim is a real risk | Applied a strict anti-fabrication rule. Anything not supplied or confirmed by the client — a role title, a coverage area, a registration detail — was flagged for sign-off rather than written in. Placeholder content was visibly marked so nothing unverified could reach the public site by accident. |
