New Website For NHS Sandwell and West Birmingham
What we did
Platform81 partnered with Sandwell & West Birmingham NHS Trust to redesign and rebuild its website, creating a modern, patient-first platform for a Trust that serves more than 530,000 people across one of England’s most diverse regions. From the initial briefing through to launch in October 2024, our team delivered the project end to end, covering discovery, design, development, content migration and hosting.
Built in line with NHS brand guidelines and WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards, the new site gives patients, staff and the wider community a faster, clearer way to find the information and services they need.
The Approach
Every design decision, from typography and colour contrast to focus states and navigation, was made with accessibility built in from the start rather than added later. Mobile-first layouts and a reduced-click structure make it easy to find services, news and recruitment information on any device.
Behind the scenes, a bespoke WordPress theme with flexible content blocks means the Trust’s communications team can publish updates and launch campaign pages without developer support. The site is hosted and supported by Platform81 on a dedicated, monitored cloud environment, built to stay online when public health messages drive spikes in traffic.
The Outcome
A Trust website is critical infrastructure: it has to stay online when a public health message goes out or an incident drives a spike in traffic. Platform81 continues to host and support the site on a dedicated, monitored cloud environment, with daily backups, penetration testing and out-of-hours emergency support. Since launching in October 2024, the site has consistently delivered against its original objectives:
- Reach: over 2 million users and 22 million interactions, with more than 585,000 completed actions (around one in nine visitors)
- Search: 100% of legacy rankings preserved, 13,000 more organic users per month, and search visitors converting 34% above the site average
- AI visibility: AI assistants are already sending visitors who convert at 14.37%, second only to organic search
- Accessibility and performance: WCAG 2.1 AA compliance confirmed by independent testing, with 90+ speed scores on mobile and desktop at launch
- Independence: the comms team publish updates without developer support, saving hundreds of hours in support tickets
- Reliability: 99.99% uptime since go-live
Platform81 combine strong technical expertise with being genuinely good people to work with. They understood our needs quickly and delivered exactly what we needed, on time and without fuss.