GLRDSC Case Study
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Who are GLRDSC?
The Greater Lincolnshire Regional Defence and Security Cluster (GL RDSC) is a local organisation representing national and international defence organisations. Their previous website did not reflect the business and what had started as a quick fix, became a permanent feature that failed to serve its members.
The Problem
The Jadu site was clunky and hard to navigate both for visitors and the team managing it. Any change to content, however minor, had to go through a bureaucratic digital team creating a bottleneck. The previous site was a basic informational style site with little interactivity or design considerations.
The GLRDSC team wanted to share news, promote events, publish video content, and build out a useful member hub, none of which the current setup could handle. The site's design and branding also didn't reflect the professionalism of the cluster or the calibre of the businesses it represented.
Why Jolly Good Web
Jolly Good Web founder Andrew Vaughan has a defence background, which meant the discovery conversations were notably different from a typical agency. The knowledge and ease of conversation came through from the initial meeting.
Jolly Good Web also brought a relevant portfolio to the table. Previous work with Royal Signals, Metis Aerospace, Mercury EW, and other defence-aligned organisations meant the cluster wasn't a first step in the world of defence websites.
With the defence cluster rooted in Lincolnshire, working with a local agency felt like the right fit.
What did they want?
GLRDSC came to us wanting a full brand design for a refreshed look and feel. Their existing site had no imagery, no visual hierarchy, and pages full of text broken up only by blue hyperlinks. There was no central navigation, branding was nowhere to be seen, and key pages like membership and funding followed no structured design.
The brief gave us a lot of creative freedom which we loved. The main goal was to build something engaging enough to encourage new businesses to join the cluster. This was to include new brand guidelines and all visuals from brand ideation and design to wireframing through to website development.
This included moving the website from Jadu over to Webflow in order to offer a faster and easier experience for both the front and back end. The new site was to be built in line with the new brand direction.
Design
The client supplied a shared library of images and videos early on which made a huge difference and gave us strong visual material to work with from the start. After our first homepage iteration they asked for a more military influenced typeface to better reflect their membership base, which ended up shaping the overall feel of the site nicely.
One of the trickier challenges was rethinking how links were displayed throughout the site. The old site leaned heavily on inline text links which made content heavy pages feel dense and hard to navigate. We worked through a range of solutions page by page, using cards, sliders, and dropdowns where they made sense. The funding page took the most thinking as it featured a long list of links that needed real structure without defaulting to a basic card grid.
The membership page got a significant rethink. The old version had a single outdated photo with member logos crammed together, missing a lot of members entirely. On the new site each member has their own card and select members link through to a CMS page where they can showcase a company bio, images and a link to their site. We also added a dedicated panel members section and a LinkedIn feed on the events page so GL RDSC can post updates there and have them automatically pull through to the site.
The new site carries their branding throughout, uses their media assets well, and gives every page the visual structure it deserved.
Development
The new site features a number of custom developed elements & interactions, such as the homepage hero section having a custom rotating circular orb animation which matches their branding. The design has a number of unique layouts, such as some sections going full width, so we created a templated approach that used page slots and components, making the site more modular and allowing for easy additions such as new pages/sections whilst keeping with the design of the site.
An important goal of the new site was to attract new members while showcasing over 100 current ones. Webflow’s CMS was used to create a templated page for each member, with each having their own summary and imagery. This allows for easy additions of future members.
The site also has a number of video assets highlighting cluster members, so a custom video player was used which incorporates GL RDSC’s branding. A unique hero section was also used on the membership page which shows 5 video pills.
Result
The new website has a refreshed feel and more accurately represents the professionalism of the organisation. It was an honour to work on the new GL RDSC website and help shape how they present themselves in the industry.
The client was a pleasure to work with; they were engaged and enthusiastic at every stage and always gave feedback that moved things forward.
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