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Developing a new digital platform for charity St Luke’s Cares

Written by: Emma Burton | 2nd October 2024
3 min read

St Luke’s Cares is a charity that plays a crucial role in supporting communities in inner South Leeds. They run a wide range of youth and community programs aimed at empowering residents to reach their full potential.

Their initiatives include youth and community groups, a support group for young mothers, a charity shop offering affordable furniture, household goods, and clothing, a retail training course, ESOL classes, volunteering opportunities, free school uniform pop-ups, and a community cinema.

Their charity shop is more than just a retail space; it serves as a community hub where people from many diverse backgrounds come together to learn, build friendships, and make a positive impact on their community. All proceeds from the shop go directly towards funding St Luke’s essential youth and community projects.

St Luke’s Cares approached Magpie to help them create a new website that would help drive furniture donations and showcase the amazing work they do. 

We conducted a UX and content workshop with the St Luke’s team to determine the website’s structure, information architecture, and content needs for its diverse audience. From this, we developed a site map, content plan, and wireframes that laid the foundations for a new website.

Workshopping the website site map and content framework
The St Lukes Team workshopping user needs for their new website

The new WordPress site was designed and developed to be future-proof, with flexible content modules that allow the St Luke’s team to easily add and update content as needed.

In addition to designing the website, we used this opportunity to refresh St Luke’s visual identity, retaining the original logo but updating the overall look to better reflect the charity’s personality, the shop, and its work in the community. This included developing a softer color palette, a friendly serif font, and a collaged illustration style inspired by the feel of the charity shop. We conducted a photoshoot in-store capturing the stock and using a blend of St Luke’s images and charity shop images to bring the concept to life. 

This project was launched in July 2024 and was a true collaborative effort, with the team at St Luke’s providing all content and imagery. 

The team at Magpie couldn’t have been more helpful in developing our new website. They came out to visit us and took time to listen and understand what we’re about as a charity.

We were really keen for the new website to make it as easy as possible for people to donate furniture/access house clearances whilst still clearly communicating about the projects and what donations go to support. We are absolutely delighted with the outcome!

The team at Magpie have also been so good with ongoing support and training to help us make the most of the website, learn how to update it and drive traffic towards it! Thanks team Magpie!

Kate Singleton
Chief Executive Officer – St Luke’s Cares

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