How a website revamp improved Morning Star’s traffic and donations

Case study: Morning Star Community Services

For any company, a digital presence is paramount to success. In this day and age, clunky old websites have got to make way for newer, sleek designs.

Yet sometimes, companies neglect the cleaning up of their own sites because they are focused on running the business on the operational side.

Morning Star Community Services was one company that was sorely in need of a redesign.

This is a case study on how we helped Morning Star, a local registered charity, improve its engagement by revamping its main website and landing page.

The background of Morning Star Community Services

Morning Star is a 30-year-old registered charity and Institution of Public Character (IPC) that works to strengthen family relationships in Singapore through six service centres across the island.

Most of the charity’s endeavours strive to create a thriving community through empowering individuals and family units in modern society.

How Morning Star helps its beneficiaries and clients include providing after-school care services and caregiving for struggling parents.

Additionally, the charity works on intervention programmes, family life education workshops, as well as counselling services.

With numerous operations across Singapore in the form of various service centres, Morning Star works hard to connect with families and individuals in Singapore who need assistance and help.

It’s not surprising, then, that Morning Star’s website was neglected in favour of doing real work on the ground with its community.

According to the company, their website was created around the 2000s, and started out as a simple site with very minimal traffic.

Part of the reason for this was hard-to-read text, and a site interface that was hard to navigate and find resources from.

This was when Morning Star got in touch with Web Imp and reached out.

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A short interview with Morning Star

Web Imp: What was the reason Morning Star wanted to change the website?

Jasper: The website was super old. It was built around the 2000s, and is around 7 to 8 years old. So one of the first few things I had to do when I joined was to revamp the website. When I was being recruited, I told the MS team we needed to change it, too. That’s why we started sourcing for vendors.

Web Imp: Were there other vendors you approached? Why did you choose Web Imp?

Jasper: Yes, we did. But we were tight on our budget. Other vendors had pros and cons, and they weren’t very flexible. There were a few vendors I didn’t approach as I didn’t think they were keen.

There was one other vendor that was rather approachable, especially regarding content and site management, but they weren’t accommodating.

The main thing is that Web Imp seemed great and was somewhat flexible, so we went along with it. Plus, you guys have done non-profit stuff. We ran a Google search and found Web Imp that way.

Web Imp: How was your experience working with Web Imp? Were there things we could have improved on?

Jasper: The team was very responsive on WhatsApp, which was great. Other vendors weren’t really responsive, and they often took a long time to solve problems. There was no such issue with you guys, whether it was about the speed of response.

Web Imp: How’s the website working so far?

Jasper: Good, as expected. Some things could have been better, but we had a limited budget. We’re also quite thankful that we got the events calendar. It wasn’t part of the deal.

We had a lot of changes too during the project that we didn’t tell you in the first place – and Web Imp did added work, which we appreciated.

When we compare the old site and the new one… well, the old site can just be thrown away. The font was really small and links were hard to find. We couldn’t get much traffic back then, but now we’re getting more, because the site is now user-friendly and we’ve got bigger text.

A plus point: we can manage the site ourselves now. The last time, we couldn’t change anything on our end because it was hard-coded in HTML, and we had to email the development team for changes and it opened up a lot of back and forth. It was very troublesome back then.

Now, we can customise the website however we want, whether it’s for advertisements or other stuff. It’s good to have control on our end.

We’re small, and you guys did us a favour with the small budget. Lots of timely responses and good service.

In summary, despite the tight deadline, you guys did a great job expediting the process, and meeting our queries and proposed changes at top speed. Thank you for being highly communicable and professional throughout!

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How did Web Imp solve Morning Star’s problems?

Website revamp

On paper, what they required us to do was a simple website revamp.

In reality, we did so much more for them. What might look like a simple website redesign on the outside actually requires our entire team’s involvement.

Brand consulting

We started off with a brand consulting: by truly understanding their brand message, who they wanted to target, and what goals they had.

We had to make sure the website design and layout reflected what they wanted to focus on.

Knowing this in mind, we designed a website that showcased a family and human theme. We created a design to make their website feel more professional and trustworthy – traits that a charity organisation needed.

Website architecture planning

For our website structure, we prioritised a flow that helped to lead users to learn more about Morning Star’s profile. We also made sure to create a visual cue to help lead people to the donation page.

One extra thing that we added was an Events Calendar.

We had to find a way to add this functionality to their website (which wasn’t easy!) so that they could easily upload new events like talks and workshops, to keep their users informed.

SEO friendly and user friendly CMS

We built the website using WordPress – a simple-to-use content management system which enabled their team to easily update and upload new content articles and news updates.

We had to make sure the website’s SEO foundations were present. We structured the website in a way that search engine robots could easily crawl, and we made sure the pages on the site were search engine friendly.

Web hosting and IT support

Lastly, we provided them with web hosting services on our speedy servers, and they’ve enjoyed our IT support services since then.

This is so that the Morning Star team trust us to solve their IT issues, and they are able to help the community with a peace of mind.

How Morning Star benefitted from the revamp

With a more professional and trustworthy design, Morning Star saw greater user engagement on their website and more donations.

With an events calendar and blog, their users can now easily keep updated on the latest news and events.

Morning Star saw improve organic search traffic due to having a better search optimised website. The easy to use CMS also means the team was able to upload more content – which helps attract more visitors too.

Despite working on a lower budget, we still managed to hand over a website that exceeded our client’s expectations.

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A website redesign is never as simple as it seems, and you need a professional team to really understand what goes into a successful revamp.

If you have specific requirements for a website redesign, feel free to reach out to us, or look at what we can provide for custom web design services.