The Arts Council of Ireland

Services

Web Development//Web Hosting//Web Support

Background

The Arts Council is the national government agency for funding, developing and promoting the arts in Ireland.

We worked alongside our long-term partner Big Motive to deliver a website of phenomenal design and functionality.

Wibble has positioned itself as a leading WordPress design and development agency in Ireland, and we were the obvious choice to produce this government project on time and on budget.

Our expertise lies in the bespoke management of all things WordPress. This project was a challenge for us, but one that we delivered with aplomb.

The Problem

The previous version of the site was dated in design, lacked accessibility, usability functionality and on mobile was difficult to navigate.

In general, the site was not a nice experience for users. Considering the subject of the website, aesthetically the site was lacking and had become an eyesore in terms of design and appearance.

The addition of content for the client was a difficult process and this led to inconsistent layouts and presentation of data that did not coordinate across the site.

The Arts Council Ireland - By Wibble Web Design and Development - Belfast

what we did

We worked exceptionally closely with the design team in Big Motive. They did an extensive round of experiments, interviews and UI/UX research plus delivered a concept that was aesthetically impressive, intuitive, and user-friendly.

We worked on everything outside of the design phase. We developed a custom WordPress theme in-house without outsourcing any of the work. Every single element of the concept was custom-built to match the specific requirements required by the client. This was all very bespoke CI/CD development workflows using the native WordPress block editor.

We do not utilise page builders for custom build work, and this site really demonstrates our ability to customise and manipulate the native WordPress editor.

We worked on a number of technical SEO policies within the website build and put hundreds of redirects in place to help. The ability for the site to be crawled, indexed, and ranked accurately was a key goal in the site requirements. The site passes all core web vitals and performs exceptionally well on mobile and desktop using Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This was something that we worked on exceptionally diligently to help with fast load times and make the browsing experience a better one for all users.

The Arts Council Of Ireland Culture Night 2024

The results

Wibble have produced a site that is exceptionally different in every way from their previous website.

In collaboration with Big Motive has resulted in a website that is accessible, usable, easy to use and fully responsive.

The site is built to scale and to be futureproof – as we are managing the infrastructure of the site, we have built the site on a fully responsive and scalable server that can grow and react to spikes in users. This feature has been a huge success as this website occasionally appears in the media and we are confident in its ability to deal with a huge increase in resources required.

The site is fast to load with all Core Web Vitals passing and an almost perfect score in PageSpeed Insights. We worked hard on ensuring that the site is lightweight, allowing quick load times and reducing ongoing management requirements.

Another feature was bilingualism. A major requirement of this site was the ability to translate it into Gaeilge. We have hammered out a niche as a leading web design agency in Ireland that has Irish speakers in their team. We utilised hreflang and other features to allow the site to be easily translated into Irish.

visit artscouncil.ie

a leading Irish web design studio, based in Belfast

This is another government agency website that we have delivered to an exceptionally high level. This project was a huge undertaking, with a massive migration of content, and it demonstrates Wibble as the best web design agency in Ireland, in our opinion. If you want to work with us, let’s have a chat.

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