BookTrust
Supporting families and professionals to get children reading
Through rigorous audience insight and collaboration, we redesigned BookTrust’s website to better serve professionals supporting families with early reading.
What we did
- Content strategy
- Usability testing
- Website design and build
Impact measured against UN Sustainable Development Goals
BookTrust are the UK’s largest children’s reading charity. They work in partnership with schools, local authorities, health services and others to get millions of children reading every year, and each year distribute over 3 million free books to families. With over a century of experience, they know how life-changing a love of reading can be.
Their new organisational strategy puts more focus than ever on the families who could benefit most from their support. This means working more closely with the professionals who support those families every day. BookTrust needed a website that reflects this new direction, while also being accessible, mobile-friendly and easy to navigate.
But creating a website is never just about the website. It’s about asking difficult questions:
How far can you change language and tone while maintaining or improving brand recognition?
What happens to the huge amount of existing content?
Which user habits are real needs, and which are outdated expectations?
Together, we worked through these questions to deliver a solution that met immediate needs and set BookTrust up for long-term success.
This project was about more than just a new website. It was about making our mission easier to deliver. William Joseph helped us navigate complex challenges with clarity and care, always keeping our audiences at the heart of the work.
Colin Atkins, Chief Operating Officer, BookTrust
Start with audiences, but think carefully about how you talk to them
BookTrust’s key audiences had shifted. Professionals were now front and centre. But the website still needed to serve parents, carers and families.
Our user research involved people from diverse backgrounds and with roles that involved them interacting with BookTrust as part of the vital work that they do for children and families. These included:
teachers
librarians
health visitors
social workers
early years professionals
It was essential to gain their honest feedback on their challenges with the existing website and what would make their lives easier for the new one. We took a trauma-informed approach to these sessions, ensuring that participants felt safe, valued and a partner in the process, rather than simply having information extracted from their experiences
Throughout testing, we found that users didn’t always distinguish content as being solely for professionals, parents or children. For example, practitioners were looking for resources they could share with the families, such as videos of storytelling tips. This meant the language on each page had to be clear, accessible and non-stigmatising.
“The young people that I work with would regard ‘vulnerable’ as a very pejorative word.”
— Social worker, Yorkshire, usability testing participant
For organisations working with disadvantaged groups, it’s vital to avoid language that creates distance. While some practitioners found the language powerful and resonant, others felt terms like ‘vulnerable’ or ‘lower income’ could be disempowering or stigmatising. When referring to specific groups or backgrounds, the content includes more detail on what is meant, whether that’s care-experienced children, children with SEN, or children from bilingual families.
“As a teacher I would be careful to put something like ‘low-income families or vulnerable backgrounds’ on a parent-facing thing… I think that the language there just needs to be a bit more cautious.”
— Literacy Lead, Curriculum Lead & Deputy Head, London, usability testing participant
BookTrust’s goal is to bring people in, not push them away. How you talk about people matters just as much as what you offer them.
For content creators and digital teams, this means:
Review language carefully for unintended bias.
Test content with different audiences.
Make accessibility and inclusion central, not an afterthought.
Understand what your content really is
BookTrust’s website held thousands of pieces of content, from book reviews and activities, to programme information and resources. But it wasn’t all clearly organised. A lot of evergreen resources were hidden away as old news articles or blog posts.
We asked a simple but powerful question: what is this content actually for? Is it a resource? A person? A book? A programme? By clearly defining these types, we created a more useful information architecture that makes it easier for people to find what they need.
Using Craft CMS’s flexible content model, we created a structured, searchable database of books, resources, programmes and more. These aren’t just static pages, they can appear wherever they’re relevant across the site. Craft’s headless technology also means that this content is future-proofed so it can be distributed by other systems in the future.
This presented a big challenge around migrating their enormous database of book reviews. When moving to a new website, content migration is always a challenge. Should you start afresh, or bring everything over? By working with content experts, they trimmed thousands of book reviews and worked with us to migrate the remaining content efficiently.
For digital leaders and practitioners, this is a reminder:
Content isn’t just words on pages. It’s data that can be used creatively to support user needs.
Structured content makes your website more useful and easier to manage over time.
Tackle content migration early; it’s never just a technical job.
Working with William Joseph helped us make smart, long-term decisions. They understood the balance we needed between serving professionals and supporting families, and guided us through some big shifts in how we manage content, design for users and think about digital internally. I appreciated how their experts could work directly and collaboratively with ours. They left us with a platform that’s flexible, practical and rooted in the real world of our users.
Graeme Manuel-Jones, Head of Digital, BookTrust
Recognise that digital change is organisational change
BookTrust’s previous CMS restricted access to just a few individuals, limiting the number of people contributing content.
With the new site, we implemented Craft CMS’s role-based permissions and simple two-factor authentication. Content creation was no longer confined to a handful of people: it became something that teams across the organisation could actively own.
This shift is about more than just tools. It’s about culture.
By making it easier for more people to contribute, BookTrust is building a content community of practice. We supported them in creating this community’s goals, values and activities from the start. As a result, teams across the organisation now see themselves as part of the digital space.
For leaders and change managers, this is a crucial reminder:
Digital projects can change how your organisation works.
New tools should empower people, not restrict them.
Finding ways to link people across hierarchies and departments is a powerful way to unlock collaboration and learning.
Use a technical partnership that proactively brings people together
Modern websites rarely operate in isolation. They need to integrate with CRMs, email marketing platforms, booking systems and more.
BookTrust knew this could become complicated. So, we brought together all the key players – internal teams, third-party providers and technical partners – at three critical moments:
Before starting development.
A week before launch to rehearse the plan.
On launch day to troubleshoot together.
When you have clear communication and shared trust, small problems stay small.
For project managers and procurement teams, the lesson is simple:
Don’t leave integration and technical coordination until the end.
Build relationships with everyone involved early in the process.
The website is not only technically robust, but genuinely supports the professionals and families we serve every day. It’s helping us bring our new strategy to life.
Colin Atkins, Chief Operating Officer, BookTrust
Use design to engage audiences with new priorities
The shift in BookTrust’s strategy to focus on practitioners needed to be reflected not just in the structure of the site, but in how it looked and felt.
While their brand is well-recognised, the previous website wasn’t making the most of BookTrust’s visual identity. We evolved the design of the site to feel more focused, professional and trustworthy, bringing the brand to life online without losing its core warmth.
Layout, navigation, typography and colours were all refined to improve readability, allowing time-pressed practitioners to find the information they need quickly.
At the same time, playful visual touches such as carefully chosen illustrations were retained in areas of the site relevant to families, parents and carers. These helped to reflect the joy inherent to reading with children.
For design and content teams, this project shows:
A new website needn’t mean reinventing your whole visual identity.
A single brand can serve different audiences, if you’re clear about your strategic priorities and flexible in your execution.
The end results
BookTrust’s new website is a platform for their future. It empowers delivery partners with easy-to-find resources, simplifies navigation for both families and professionals, and gives their teams the tools to keep improving and growing.
And it shows that when you get people, content and technology working together, the results go far beyond a website.