About Supershoes

Supershoes empower children fighting cancer in the UK, enhancing physical & emotional wellbeing while raising awareness along the way.

Supershoes are a local Milton Keynes based registered charity. They provide unique customised shoes for incredibly brave children and young people, who are receiving treatment or palliative care for cancer. Each pair of shoes are designed specifically for a particular individual and are hand painted by a Super Artist to express the child and all of the things they like.

Supershoes is a completely voluntary organisation.

The Project Brief

Supershoes approached Amasci to help them refocus their online presence and overall brand. Their existing website was built on the WordPress system but wasn’t very well structured and made updating the site an unpleasant experience. Supershoes had transitioned from an initial startup to a very successful registered charity and their current website didn’t reflect the great work they were doing.

Their previous website did not have the quality or depth of information that reflected their charity. Navigating the site was clunky and un-intuitive, and as a result the site looked amateurish and stale due to regular updates being hidden within the news section. This section contained all news and stories and really didn’t successfully promote the great work that Supershoes are doing.

As well as revamping their online identity and giving Supershoes a professional platform, the site was also required to increase awareness, reach a wider audience, promote the work of the artists, volunteers and sponsors and ultimately to increase donations and get more supporters to back Supershoes.

Our Solution

We started the project by listening to Supershoes to fully understand the work they did, how they achieved this and to identify what their goals were as a charity. Hearing the passion and genuine enthusiasm from the Trustees was all inspiring and helped us quickly appreciate the direction we needed to take the project.

Initial research, strategy and branding

After some research, we devised an initial strategy with Supershoes. Whilst this set the overall aims and goals for the website and branding, it allowed scope for the project to evolve and change as we worked together. In turn this lead to a much more comprehensive site with lots of features and functionality. By having regular review meetings we were able to easily review specific aspects of the website and ensure that the customer journey was a valuable and enjoyable experience throughout.

During the design phase we focussed on the branding. As Supershoes work with children we wanted to ensure that the brand and style was a colourful, friendly and fun experience. Having a subject matter that is sad, we needed to counteract this with a upbeat and enjoyable style. We particular paid attention to the fonts and typography. We opted for a font-face that had a slightly childish feel, but also one that tried to subtly reflect the laces within shoes. Naturally this has to be clear and legible and getting this balance right was essential.
The new logo had a rich and wide colour palette, which gave us a good choice of colours to use throughout the web design and brand. We took the gradients in the main logo and used this within the single colour bands, that are present throughout the website.

Promotion of Volunteers, Artists and Sponsors

One aspect that Supershoes were keen to include was the promotion of the work of their volunteers, artists and sponsors. Through discussion we suggested that we would create individual pages for the artists and sponsors. The reasons for this were to; firstly offer recognition of their involvement, secondly give them a platform that they could promote (each artist and sponsors contain galleries and stories for the children they have worked with), this would help promote Supershoes and reach a wider audience, and thirdly help to promote more regular donations and involvement with Supershoes.

Donations to Supershoes

The key area of the website was the Donation section. Throughout the project the requirements of this function evolved. Initially we discussed a single donation mechanism through Just Giving. However, after reviewing this it was agreed that we could enhance this to offer a lot more options and make the donation mechanism part of the Supershoes website (rather than directing to a third party). We enhanced the donation section to include 4 options to donate; by Text, by BACs, by Card and by PayPal.
We created several call to actions to Donate, as well as a quick donation mechanism in the footer.

The website runs under secure SSL (https://) and we integrated Stripe as a gateway provider to take Card payments through the Supershoes website. We kept PayPal as another option and this integrates with their payment facility and reverts back to the Supershoes site after a successful transaction. During the donate process, all users details are captured to allow Supershoes to track donations and liaise with customers if there is an issue or the customer drops out during the process. We also included a Gift Aid option to automatically calculate the value if a customer opts in to Gift Aid.

Generating additional income via the brand and merchandise

As well as donations Supershoes hoped to gain investment through their Merchandise. Whist their eCommerce solution is a small offering initially, we created this section with Scope for Supershoes to introduce a wider range of goods in the future. The shop mechanism also integrates with the Stripe payment facility, so customers can purchase the merchandise online.

Super Kids

The stories, gallery and news sections allow Supershoes to promote all the great work they are doing and keep the website up to date, and engaging for users. The Super Kids section allow customers to view each story, related stories by age and diagnosis, as well as establish which Super Artist and Super Sponsor was involved. There is a diagnosis section, which details more information on each of the illnesses that Supershoes work with and stories can be viewed and categorised by this too.
The gallery section features every single pair of Supershoes created, there is a facility to filter the gallery by Artist and Sponsors or to view them all. We built this section to remain performance optimised through some lazy-loading of the images, but ensuring the filtering mechanism still functioned correctly. The filter mechanism for the Artists and Sponsors works with an auto-complete field to help you find the Artists and Sponsors as you type.

Content Management Facility

The website is built on the Grab a Perch Runway CMS system and allows Supershoes to update any of their content; add new stories, gallery items news etc. The CMS is built from scratch, meaning it is structured exactly to the requirements of Supershoes and their website, thus making is super easy and friendly to use and update.