A home for fifty years of British advertising

British Arrows has celebrated British advertising since 1976. It's a not-for-profit, run by a small team, that puts the whole UK industry in a room once a year.

Having already worked with them on the previous iteration of their website, and with the 50th anniversary celebrations coming up, the team once again recruited us to redesign and build a new site.

We audited the old site, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each section and compiled a list of goals for each page. This resulted in comprehensive wireframes that were used to map out, test and improve on every feature.

The old home page would go stale very quickly, with no way to promote content to the heading. The team can now pin news articles and features to the top of the site, keeping everything fresh in the lead-up to each event.

Instead of several disjointed pages, each event now lives on one dynamic page, built from blocks that can be set to show before the event, after it, or always. The page grows and changes as the event approaches, then again once it’s passed.

The original archive was only built to handle events from the last 5 years or so, but the 50th anniversary rebuild was to eventually accommodate all 50 years of winners – 4,008 awards across 3,568 films. This called for better filtering, search, and performance.

The team manages all the winners, films, credits, and related companies from an Airtable database which acts as one simple source of truth that any member of the team can easily navigate and update. We build a custom Craft CMS integration that syncs the data into the site.