House of Life at Willesden Jewish Cemetery
(United Synagogue Cemetery)
Willesden Jewish Cemetery has been a prestigious burial ground for London’s Jewish community since 1873. In 2020, investment by the National Lottery, the United Synagogue opened up the cemetery for the wider public to discover and explore.
The funding enabled the building of a new visitors centre to house, “The “House of Life” heritage project. Funding was also used to restore historic buildings, memorials and gardens and develop exhibits and events for new audiences and a website.
In conjunction with Philip Simpson Design and Aimee Capstick, That Web Person Limited developed the website for the cemetery using Squarespace.
Since this was a brand new website for a brand new project, it was important to understand early what the website was trying to achieve, who the audiences might be, what information they needed, but also what information the project needed to get across to grow its audiences. We dedicated a lot of time to getting to know the project and the team in a detailed scoping phase. This helped us plan out the site navigation and ensure the content was focused on the user.
The project was completed during COVID-19 Lockdown, so before launch there needed to be a slight pivot, but the website was designed to be flexible, so this wasn’t much of an issue.
The initially ‘simple magazine’ site ended up growing to over 60 pages with galleries, blogs, events and advanced booking forms. Users are encouraged to move around the site with teaser content and calls-to-action.
With full content management training, the site is 100% managed by the team without the need for ongoing support. In addition, the team were educated in good web writing practices and search engine optimisation. With user reports provided through Google Data Studio, the team can monitor performance and adapt the content depending on their evolving marketing strategy.
Key achievements
Detailed scoping and content discovery phase
Designing website architecture around content and user’s need
Adapting a Squarespace template to fit sites needs
Detailed training for self-management
Google tracking and automated reporting to monitor user journeys
“Reena O’Neill, ‘That Web Person’ was so much more than that! She helped us build a website from absolute zero to an all-singing all-dancing 60 pages of visitor-focused, clear and interesting communication. She was magnificently patient with our changes and attentive to detail in working out the navigation and putting functionality together with our content. It was great to work with her. ”
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