A New Website to Support a New Digital Strategy

When I arrived at the British Council, our US website was outdated in both design and content. As part of a global organization, our country website had to conform to brand guidelines and fit in to the global digital strategy. The corporate digital team rolled out a light-touch, WordPress CMS as an interim solution for country operations that could implement it quickly during the development of a more customized CMS. I jumped at the opportunity to build a new site on WordPress, and after submitting a strategic business case, I was given approval to do so.

Over the course of five weeks, I planned, wrote, and produced all the content on the site and provided input into the top-level navigation, which was used as a template for future country sites. I launched the British Council’s second WordPress-based country site in June 2012, one year after I joined the organization. In the year that followed, I increased our US visitors to the website from 25% to 60% through content better targeted to our US markets.