For birders in Bedfordshire, England, having access to the right information can make or break a day out. The Bedfordshire Bird Club has long been a hub for the county’s passionate birding community, but their website wasn’t keeping up with how people actually bird today.
“The old website didn’t work on mobile phones, and obviously everybody in the birding community is now using their phones out in the field,” explains Tom Jackson, a committee member at the club. For a community that lives and breathes birding, that was a serious problem.
Enter WordPress.com.
One redesign later, the club has a modern, mobile-friendly site that puts essential birding information right where it’s needed: in members’ hands (assuming they’re not already holding binoculars). The new site—now hosted on Pressable—features an interactive map of birding locations across the county, complete with practical details like parking information, what species you might spot, and even how to find each site.
“The website is just amazing,” says Kathy Blackmore, the club’s walk organizer. “It looks so inviting, so modern. The information is all accessible, it’s got lots of fabulous photographs.”
The transformation was about more than simple aesthetics. No one at the club had the technical expertise or time to tackle such a project on their own, so Automattic’s special-projects team worked with the BBC—not that BBC, this one—to implement all the features the club needed. The result is a site that matches the passion of Bedfordshire’s birding community and makes it easier than ever for members to share their enthusiasm for birds, conservation, and the natural world.
After all, the best website is one that gets out of the way and lets you focus on what matters. Which, in this case, has two wings and is liable to fly away before you get a good look at it.
Learn more about how Automattic’s special projects team approached the site design here.
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