Customer focussed housing association site & portal.
Communicating clearly with clients and customers
What did Housing Plus Group need?
Housing Plus Group provides affordable homes, care and support services across Staffordshire, Shropshire and Telford and Wrekin. With tens of thousands of homes under management and a wide range of community services, their website needed to work properly for a lot of different people.
The previous site had not kept pace with the organisation’s scope. Housing Plus Group serves existing customers looking for housing support, prospective residents exploring homes, partners, community stakeholders and internal teams managing content. With that breadth of audience and that volume of information, poor structure does real damage – people cannot find what they need, trust erodes and the organisation’s communication of its impact gets lost.
The brief was to replace the site with something clearer: better organised, properly accessible, faster, and structured so that content across housing, care, community programmes, news, careers and corporate information could all be found quickly and maintained easily.
This was a build project. The design was supplied to us.
What the site needed to do:
- Give existing customers clear pathways to housing support, services and contact
- Help prospective residents understand the Group’s homes and how to apply
- Communicate the organisation’s community impact beyond housing – neighbourhood investment, employment advice, local funding
- Support internal teams managing a large and varied content set without developer involvement
- Meet accessibility requirements properly for a public-facing organisation serving a broad audience
- Improve technical performance and SEO foundations across the full site
Our approach
Project overview
A bespoke WordPress build for a large housing association with a broad public-facing remit. Design supplied by the client. Our focus was on translating that design into a technically excellent, accessible and scalable platform structured around multiple distinct audience types.
Content structure
- Content reorganised into intuitive sections: Our Homes, Services and Support, News and Events, Careers and Contact
- Structure supports both first-time visitors and existing customers looking for specific information quickly
- Templates created for homes, customer services, news and careers – consistent layout and presentation throughout
- Community impact content given proper prominence – neighbourhood investment, employment advice and local funding all visible
Accessibility
- Accessibility built into the technical foundations throughout – not a checklist applied at the end
- Clear, readable layouts and accessible navigation for a broad audience that includes vulnerable users
- Semantic HTML, keyboard navigability and sufficient contrast standards applied across all templates
- For a public-facing housing organisation, accessibility is a requirement, not an enhancement
WordPress build
Bespoke build on our own custom starter theme, translating the supplied design faithfully into a fast, clean WordPress codebase. Purpose-built ACF content blocks give internal teams control over the full content set – news, publications, annual reports, homes listings, careers and community content – without developer involvement for routine updates.
SEO and performance
Technical foundations built for performance and discoverability. News updates, publications and annual reports structured to improve search visibility. Fast loading times across all templates – a housing association website is a practical tool for a lot of people, many of whom are accessing it in difficult circumstances. It needs to work.
A large public sector or housing build?
If you have a design and need a development partner who can build to a high technical standard – with accessibility, performance and content management all properly handled – we should talk.
Tell us what you are working with and we will tell you how we would approach the build.
The results
99/100
Google PageSpeed score on mobile and desktop at launch
Restructured
Content reorganised into clear audience-led sections – existing customers and prospective residents both find what they need faster
100%
Of content manageable by internal teams – no developer involvement needed for news, publications, homes listings or community content
Accessible
Proper accessibility standards built into the technical foundations – a requirement for a public-facing organisation of this scale
Scalable
Platform built to accommodate the Group’s full range of services and community programmes as the organisation grows
Clear
User journeys improved for customers, prospective residents, partners and stakeholders – all from a single platform
Technical details
WordPress theme
Built on our own bare-bones WordPress starter theme. Design supplied by the client and translated faithfully into clean, fast WordPress code. No inherited styles, no third-party framework dependencies, no bloat. The same performance-first discipline we apply to every project, regardless of whether we designed it or built it.
Plugins
We keep third-party plugins to a minimum. This site uses ACF-powered content blocks edited in the Gutenberg editor. The default WordPress block library was disabled entirely – editors can only use the purpose-built blocks we created, which means every page is built consistently and on-brand regardless of who published it.
Accessibility
Semantic HTML, keyboard navigability, sufficient colour contrast and clear focus states applied throughout. Housing association websites are used by a wide range of people – including those in housing need or facing difficult circumstances. The site needs to work for all of them. That requires technical care in the build, not just good intentions in the design.
Content templates
Dedicated templates for homes, customer services, news, careers and community content – each consistent in structure and manageable by the internal team. Publications and annual reports structured for discoverability. As Housing Plus Group adds new services or community programmes, the platform accommodates them without structural work.
Why WordPress was the right platform for Housing Plus Group.
A housing association website has to serve people who are not browsing for pleasure. They need information, and they need to find it quickly.
Someone looking for an affordable home is not casually exploring a website. Someone trying to contact their housing provider about a repair, or find out about support services available to them, needs the information to be where they expect it and the site to load without delay. The stakes are practical.
WordPress is the right platform here because of the content management requirements as much as anything else. Housing Plus Group has a large and varied content set – homes, care services, community programmes, news, publications, careers – and internal teams need to be able to keep all of it current without developer dependency. ACF content blocks make that possible in a way that a complex bespoke system or a template-based platform would not.
The accessibility argument is also particularly important in this context. Housing association websites are used by a wide demographic, including people with disabilities, older residents and people in difficult circumstances. Getting accessibility right requires technical care in the build – semantic markup, proper focus management, keyboard navigability, contrast standards. These are not design decisions. They are build decisions, and they were made correctly here.
This was a build project. The design was supplied. Our job was to make it technically excellent. That is what we did.
