Leeds BID (Business Improvement District) represents over 1,000 businesses and organisations in Leeds City Centre, improving experiences, standards and adding value for all city users. The BID raises the profile of Leeds nationally and internationally with new, diverse and prestigious events and exciting marketing campaigns, leading on innovative projects and providing investment.

We were commissioned to create a new digital platform for Leeds BID following their rebrand in 2016. The BID’s original website was rich in content but the navigation structure was unintuitive and the off-the-shelf theme was holding the website back from showcasing the BID’s work, inspiring events and projects and all the stunning photography in their library.

Early on it was clear that the new platform needed to cater for a broad range of audiences so our Discovery phase included Stakeholder analysis and a user story workshop with the team before we set to work on creating the content and navigation structure.

To best communicate the BID’s role in encouraging business activity and helping to shape the city centre, three key areas were identified, ‘The BID’, ‘News’, ‘Events’, supplemented by a handful of additional pages. Over the course of the design and development the ‘Events’ section evolved to ‘Projects’, which include Leeds International Festival, the MOBOs, the Radio Academy ARIAs and Welcome To Leeds.

With the structure ready, so much rich content to work with and requirements, preferences and inspiration gathered, our designers set to work on creating gorgeous layouts true to Leeds BID’s new brand guidelines, which had been developed by in house design team. With the winning concept decided, our designers collaborated with the BID’s designers to finalise page layouts for key pages for our developers to interpret into a living, breathing draft version of the website.

During the build phase, our team migrated the stories and content from the BID’s old WordPress website whilst the BID’s marketing team created brand new content identified during the Discovery phase. For content management, we added a suite of custom SEO tools requested by the team.