The Bar Council is a membership organisation that serves more than 16,500 barristers and legal professionals practising law across England and Wales.
As specialist, independent advocates, barristers enable people to uphold their legal rights, often acting on behalf of the most vulnerable members of society.
The Bar Council’s new website needed to represent the Bar and all its members, building trust in the profession and promoting the high standards that define it. Pixl8 Group had the solution - one built on Preside.
What the Bar Council wanted
The Bar Council’s new web platform had to incorporate three existing sites: The Bar Council, Young Bar Hub and the Employed Bar Hub.
Clear navigation was paramount to the new website which would now serve the needs of several audiences including barristers, other chambers staff, students, policymakers, press, other legal organisations as well as the general public.
Built using Pixl8’s flexible digital platform Preside, the design focus was on rationalising where content could be found by making clearer user journeys across the website.
On top of greater functionality, the new website required greater use of rich media such as video, while also being mobile friendly and designed to compliment and highlight the Bar Council brand.
Speed & Efficiency
The previous website was not easily searchable and users were sometimes frustrated. With a refined and easy to use resource library in place, the Bar Council is now able to provide searchable keyword tagged content. This results in being able to quickly find the documents they require.
20:20 Vision
Design workshops enable us to discover an organisation’s aspirations and ambitions for its website. By working collaboratively with the client, they are at the center of the design process. With the Bar Council, we held a workshop where we gave their team a list of 20 websites to review swiftly. This information gave the Pixl8 Design team recurring positive elements of the top scoring websites to help deliver prototype web design concepts.
“There has been extremely positive feedback by internal and external audiences, stating that the new website is an incredible improvement compared to the old one.”
End-User Collaboration
To fully understand the Bar Council’s audience and their needs, Pixl8 ran tailored workshops with carefully selected end-users. From law students through to barristers, we took members through a series of questions and examples of how the new website could function for them. We then used their feedback to build navigational paths for those core Bar Council personas.
Password protected video content
The Bar Council’s new website required an area for witnesses to access training scheme video content. We built a secure password protected page for the website, which now enables individual users to confirm they have completed their required training.
Fashion is fleeting. Style is forever.
Ensuring the Bar Council’s website remains on brand, Pixl8 developed bespoke style guidelines so their team can continue to deliver consistent, clear and engaging content for their audience.
The Bar Council needed to relay a lot of complicated information to their members through Covid-19. Document and content management in Preside has made that possible to do effectively.