Sea Ranger Service

Supporting an international scale-up with big environmental goals

Creating a new website positioned for growth that's easy to update, brand consistent and supports multiple languages.

Supporting an international scale-up with big environmental goals

Background

The Sea Ranger Service is a company on a mission to restore 1 million hectares of ocean biodiversity by 2040, training 20,000 young people towards a maritime career in the process.

The challenge

The Sea Ranger Service approached us to design and build a new website capable of supporting their aims as they transition from a startup/disruptor to a scale-up.

With their strong presence in multiple countries, the site needed to support multiple languages and to have different editorial control in each territory. The site needed to support their growing e-commerce requirements and the admin experience had to be simple to use, allowing for rich and expressive content to be published with ease.

The Sea Ranger Service have a really strong brand and this needed to be reflected in the site and be consistently applied, regardless of who was editing the content.

The results

The new website has had a significant impact on all aspects of the business. Of particular note are:

  • 71% increase in engagement
  • 40% increase in page views
  • 41% increase in calls to action
Dan Benham - Head of Communications @ Sea Ranger Service

Working with Rareloop has been a pleasure. From the start of the project they got a good grasp of what we needed as a business. Their thorough scoping sessions dug deep into every aspect of our mission, and made sure the rest of the project was well informed. As the new site came to life through the design and build process, it was great to see that all of the decisions we’d made during the scoping sessions were now considered and all working together. Since the site has gone live we have continued working with Rareloop, with them providing ongoing support for the site. This gives us peace of mind that all the necessary updates are done to keep the site optimised and running smoothly, as well as giving us some time to make improvements to the site each month. Above all the team at Rareloop are always friendly and reliable, happy to talk things through on a call, and always happy to explore solutions to new problems.

Dan Benham, Head of Communications

Stunning web design

The Sea Ranger Service has a strong brand identity and the site needed to match and showcase this aesthetic.

To support the rollout of the aesthetic we created a Design System for the site based on their brand. This ensured a more consistent application of the brand across all components created.

Multilingual and multi-territory

Using WordPress multisite we were able to develop a single theme that could be used for multiple territories. This meant that teams in each territory would benefit from new feature development and the portfolio of sites could all benefit from shared maintenance and support, dramatically reducing the total cost of ownership as new territories are added.

Whilst each territory’s site shared a common set of components and styling it was important that they could each have differing content as required. By using WordPress multisite each territory was a standalone site, with its own set of editor users and the ability to create any pages and posts relevant to that region. To better support Sea Ranger Service’s global audience, we implemented a territory switcher in the main navigation that automatically picked up all available territories.

The site is hosted on Kinsta which supports subdomain multisite, taking care of the usually complex SSL Certificate setup common with this approach. Territories can easily be created from the admin dashboard by Sea Ranger Service staff.

Powerful user permissions and admin controls

With multiple-territories and languages to manage, the site needed to provide comprehensive user permissions and access controls. Using WordPress Multisite, not only could granular editing permissions be given to each user, but these could also be done on a per territory basis. This provided a high level of user access control to the admin of the site as a whole.

Ecommerce store

Sea Ranger Service provides a number of branded items and needed a way to provide an easy to use ecommerce experience. Online selling was however not the primary purpose of the site and so was a perfect candidate for Shopify.

We applied the website branding to the shopify store ensuring a consistent customer experience. By using Shopify, Sea Ranger Service benefitted from a single, affordable subscription for their ecommerce and were able to offer a high customer experience out of the box including Apple/Google Pay and order tracking via the Shop app.

Using Shopify enabled Sea Ranger Service to focus more of their website budget on the bespoke aspects of their site, increasing the return-on-investment for the overall project.

Career listings

One key area the site needed to support was recruitment. We helped produce a careers section, including a page to articulate the employee value proposition and a listing of all available roles.

The site also integrated the application process with Asana to streamline the operational side of managing the recruitment process.

Sea Ranger Service - Wireframe

Discovery

We started our partnership with the Sea Ranger Service by diving deep into their current website. We wanted to understand what worked and what didn’t, and to figure out their vision for the future.

Together, we created detailed profiles of their ideal audience. This led to a clear site structure, with key landing pages and user journeys carefully mapped out.

This initial phase was crucial for building a strong foundation for the project. It helped us align our goals and create a strategic plan for the website’s development.

Reliable, performant, green hosting

A high-performing website requires a solid foundation. Reliable hosting is essential for delivering a seamless user experience. This includes efficient deployment, robust security, optimised infrastructure, and fast load times.

Kinsta offers a WordPress hosting solution that excels in these areas. Their platform is feature-rich, cost-effective, and designed to work seamlessly with modern WordPress setups. Their exceptional support team, with deep WordPress knowledge, is renowned for its responsiveness.

Kinsta’s commitment to security is evident in their included features such as automatic backups, SSL certificates, and advanced DDoS protection. Additionally, they provide multiple environments to streamline development and testing.

We found that Kinsta’s built-in CDN and caching significantly improved image load times for our global audience.

As an added benefit, Kinsta’s infrastructure is powered by Google Cloud Platform, utilising 100% renewable energy.

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