Real Ideas: From five fragmented websites to one unified platform.

The organisation

Real Ideas is a social enterprise based in South West England that uses creativity, technology, and community development to solve social problems, regenerate areas, and support local businesses. Across three locations they host an extraordinary range of public-facing events — from 360-degree dome projections to workshops, exhibitions, and community activities — drawing audiences from across the region every month.

Behind that public face was an organisational structure that had grown organically over a decade, and a digital presence that reflected every layer of that growth. By the time Upshot was brought in, Real Ideas had one main website and four sub-brand sites — Real Immersive, Real Art Make Print, Real Pathways, and Real Ideas Nature & Neighbourhoods — each representing a distinct team and area of expertise. What had started as sensible internal differentiation had, over time, created something far more problematic.

The problem

The sub-brands had taken on a life of their own. Each had its own website, its own identity, and its own audience — but the boundaries between them had become blurred, both internally and externally. Services overlapped. Teams operated in silos. Customers trying to understand what Real Ideas actually offered were met with five different answers across five different websites. The sub-brands, originally rooted in the Real Ideas identity, had gradually become more synonymous with the physical locations they operated from than with the organisation behind them.

The client's primary ask was consolidation — fold everything back into the Real Ideas brand and reduce the digital footprint from five sites to one. But underneath that ask was a more fundamental problem: the existing website was extraordinarily difficult to maintain. Adding new pages, keeping event information current, and evolving the booking system as the organisation grew had become a genuine operational burden. The new website needed to solve that maintainability problem, not just look better.

Two existing functions were non-negotiable: event listings fulfilled through Eventbrite, and bookable facilities across all three locations — meeting rooms, print facilities, and hot desks available to both staff and the public.

My primary contact throughout the project was Emily Saunders, Operations and Systems Lead, who provided exceptional access to relevant team members across departments and whose operational understanding of the organisation proved invaluable at every stage.

Making sense of five websites

With a defined but limited budget relative to the scope, I couldn't afford to design first and discover problems later. Before reviewing anything with the client I spent time independently mapping all five existing sites, collating content, identifying overlaps, and building a comprehensive picture of everything the new site would need to cover.

Only once I had that independent understanding did I sit down with the client to review their proposed sitemap — the one they'd outlined in the original project tender. Having done the groundwork meant I could ask informed, probing questions rather than simply accepting their proposal at face value. The result was a revised sitemap that took their original requirements and our combined feedback into account, approved by the client as a more comprehensive and detailed plan of action.

From there I created black and white wireframes for every page — deliberately stripped of any branding or visual design. Those wireframes served a dual purpose: they gave the client a tangible, low-stakes way to validate structure and content flow, and they became the content brief I used to engage each department across Real Ideas.

Rather than asking departments to simply "send content," I gave each team a clear, structured guide — character limits, heading levels, content flows, image specifications — that defined exactly what was needed and provided unambiguous pass or fail criteria. This turned a potentially chaotic content gathering process across multiple teams into a managed, accountable one.

As content arrived, it immediately revealed whether the wireframes were working or needed adjustment — quick, inexpensive changes at a stage when nothing was committed. It wasn't until approximately 80% of content was confirmed that I began applying the Real Ideas visual identity to the site. Designing around real content rather than placeholders meant the visual design work was done once, not twice.

The strategic insight

Midway through the project it became clear that Real Ideas was simultaneously working on dissolving the sub-brands entirely — folding all services back into the main Real Ideas identity as a deliberate organisational decision, not just a website one. What had initially appeared as a complication turned out to be the answer.

With the sub-brands being retired, the new site didn't need to accommodate or reference them at all. Instead we built the architecture around locations — three distinct location pages that became the primary navigational anchors of the site. This was a win on every level: users in a specific area could find what was relevant to them naturally and intuitively, Real Ideas gained the organisational prominence the client had been seeking for years, and the internal team silos that had grown around sub-brand identities were structurally dismantled in the process.

The solution wasn't designed in a meeting room. It emerged from staying close to what the organisation was actually doing, asking the right questions at the right time, and recognising that the website problem and the brand strategy problem were the same problem.

Solving the events challenge

Real Ideas hosts between 50 and 150 events every month. Events are created and fulfilled through Eventbrite — ticket sales, attendee capacity, and a platform their customers already knew and trusted. Maintaining that integration on the new site was essential.

The obvious solution was a direct Eventbrite feed embedded into the website. We looked at it seriously and ruled it out. A direct feed gave Real Ideas insufficient control over the look and feel of their events listings, and it couldn't accommodate third-party events using other platforms — a real operational need for an organisation of their breadth.

Instead we configured an API connection between Eventbrite and Webflow's CMS. Every event created in Eventbrite — title, dates, times, description, images, event ID, and series information — was automatically mirrored into a Webflow CMS collection. Each event page on the website then dynamically embedded the corresponding Eventbrite checkout, providing a seamless ticket purchase experience specific to that event, within a fully branded environment Real Ideas controlled entirely.

The additional benefit was flexibility. Because the events system was built on Webflow CMS rather than a direct platform feed, Real Ideas could also create custom event listings for activities using other platforms — something a direct Eventbrite integration could never have accommodated.

Migration and SEO

Moving from five content-rich websites with years of accumulated history to a single new platform on a different CMS was always going to carry SEO risk. We were transparent with the client about this from the outset — consolidation at this scale would cause some disruption, and setting that expectation honestly was more important than false reassurance.

To minimise the impact we maintained existing page URLs wherever possible, implemented comprehensive redirect mapping both within Webflow and at DNS level, and ensured alt text, aria labels, schema markup, and Core Web Vitals were all properly considered throughout the build. Best practice wasn't an afterthought — it was built into the development process from the beginning.

The outcome

Post-launch analytics told a story complicated by timing — Real Ideas had experienced two significant engagement peaks in the period immediately before launch, which made the initial numbers look flat. But comparing November 2025 to January 2026 against the same period the previous year, visitor numbers, page sessions, and bounce rate had all improved, albeit modestly. Given the scale of change — five sites to one, WordPress to Webflow, four sub-brands dissolved, an entirely new information architecture — those numbers represented a genuinely positive result.

The more meaningful outcome was operational. Emily and the Real Ideas team reported a dramatic improvement in how manageable the website was to maintain post-launch. Content updates that had previously been painful were now straightforward. The site's narrative was more aligned with the organisation's actual goals. User satisfaction improved as a result of a significantly more intuitive experience. And the dissolution of the sub-brands — years in the making as an organisational ambition — finally had a digital home that reflected it.

The maintainability problem that had brought Real Ideas to us in the first place had been solved.

The migration from Eventbrite to TicketTailor, completed three months after launch with zero disruption to Real Ideas' events programme, is documented as a separate case study.