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Sinn Féin

Background

Sinn Féin is the largest party on the island of Ireland, they have political representatives in Stormont, Dáil Éireann, Westminster, Brussels, The Seanad and in every council all across the island.

Sinn Féin went on the search for a web design, and web development agency that could deliver on redesigning and rebuilding their entire web presence from the ground up. They wanted to work with the best web design agency in Ireland, and that is the reason they chose Wibble.

The Problem

The previous website was not optimised in any way for the growth plans that Sinn Féin had. The site infrastructure was a convoluted mix of subdomains, sub-folders and poorly worked integrations.

The membership system was complex and administration of it was an issue. It was using a payment system that was difficult to integrate with and for years had caused issues with membership renewals, membership issuing and general membership management.

Their technical SEO was poor due to an overreliance on subdomains for functionality where entire WordPress sites would be spun up in order to facilitate functionality.

Their site needed a complete overhaul with no code being of use from the previous iteration.

Sinn Féin by Wibble Web Design and Web Development
Sinn Féin by Wibble Web Design and Web Development

what we did

We did every possible stage in a complex website redesign, redevelopment, and migration project. This project was a huge undertaking for Wibble web design, and web development, and every single team member of the agency was utilised at one time or another.

We undertook a huge audit of the existing site structure and set up a completely rigorous rework and rebuild of every single facet of the website. We suggested the removal of dozens of subdomains and the movement away from Braintree to Stripe as their prominent payment processor.

We rebuilt their entire membership sign-up and renewal system within a custom WordPress theme, which was a complex but achievable project for Wibble being a leading web design and development agency with a leading expertise in custom WordPress development.

We also needed to migrate over 15,000 news articles from different iterations of previous websites and put redirections and internal linking with code optimisation in place for the display and delivery of these crucial parts of Sinn Féin’s digital marketing strategy.

We also set up the entire hosting infrastructure for the huge site and we’re responsible for all DNS changes and database setups. The site is hosted on a fully scalable, autonomous server that scales up and scales down depending on load, a feature that has come in very handy when Sinn Féin is featured in the media, for example.

built with wordpress block editor

As part of the project, we undertook a huge content mapping and custom block building exercise. Every single part of the site layout was designed, developed, and launched by the team here in Wibble.

We do not use page builders for custom WordPress development. Instead, all elements of the backend of the website were custom built off the native WordPress block editor to ensure manageability, improve site speed and future-proof the site for years to come.

As a policy, we do not throw WordPress plugins at a problem, we would always attempt to write custom functions or code to fix any issues. An over-reliance on plugins can leave sites slower and more susceptible to vulnerabilities. We custom wrote the vast majority of the code base, another demostration that we are one of the best web design agencies in Ireland.

Sinn Féin by Wibble Web Design and Web Development
Sinn Féin by Wibble Web Design and Web Development

the results

The web site is un-recognisable to the previous version. It is a rebuild from the ground up in every sense. We have rebuilt their membership system, Stripe integrations, their donation system, their summer draw fundraiser and hundreds of other features.

We’ve seen thousands of Stripe transactions with a huge amount of entries being bought in the fundraising draws that we designed and developed with a custom Stripe integration thrown in for good measure.

There has been massive amounts of positive feedback from users, members and staff within Sinn Féin. We continue to support and manage every facet of the site infrastructure under the Wibble Support Package: we are responsible for the entire WordPress infrastructure and testing, management and support of all updates.

visit Sinn Féin

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Wibble are seen as one of the best web design agencies in Ireland. We are a Belfast web design studio with a global client list who came to us for specialist web design and development services. If you want to work with an award-winning agency, let’s talk.
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