Transforming a charity website to support patients, families and boost donations

St John’s Hospice is a Lancashire charity which provides free palliative care to patients with life shortening conditions. Its services cover a population area of 250,000 in North Lancashire, South Lakes and North Yorkshire.

Strategic goal

To design and build a new, user-friendly WordPress website to provide important information to its target audience; people who require palliative care, their family members and friends. The website also required a new e-commerce facility to support fundraising.

SQ role

We provided a full redesign and build of the website on WordPress, ensuring internal teams could manage content. The previous website was unable to do this.

SQ approach

The existing website faced several challenges that impacted user experience and operational efficiency. Data management needed improvement, particularly in how reports were uploaded into Donorflex, ensuring all necessary fields were included in a single, organised system.

Event registration was cumbersome, limiting the Hospice’s ability to link fundraising pages seamlessly. Excessive plug-ins complicated site performance, while the website’s structure relied too heavily on posts rather than pages, making key information harder to find.

Navigation issues meant users struggled to locate fundraising projects, shop details and job vacancies without unnecessary steps. Additionally, vital content was often buried in poorly formatted PDFs rather than integrated into searchable webpages.

Recruitment processes also lacked user-friendliness, making job applications less appealing, with no automated acknowledgment or efficient forwarding to the HR team. Addressing these issues required a complete restructuring, focusing on accessibility, ease of use and a streamlined digital experience for supporters, donors and applicants alike.

Client feedback

We pride ourselves on delivering a great experience to all of our clients, no matter the service they choose. So, we are thrilled to receive feedback from Sophy Horner:

"SQ Digital created a new website for St John's Hospice, which greatly improved the user experience. The new design made for a clearer, more professional and friendlier image. It is now much simpler for website visitors to access and find the information needed. The SQ team have been responsive to its changing needs and have worked with St John's to implement improvements to the site to optimise the supporter journey. The website is crucial to St John's Hospice as the first port of call for information about hospice care services. It also provides information about and e-commerce support for income generation activities; the latter funds 75% of St John's care, which illustrates just how important this functioning and welcoming website is to our charity.

Feedback from users, hospice staff and volunteer show their increased satisfaction with the hospice website, compared to the previous site, so we are delighted with SQ's work. We enjoy working with SQ Digital and look forward to continuing to!"