New Website For NHS Sandwell and West Birmingham
What we did
Sandwell & West Birmingham NHS Trust serves a catchment population of more than 530,000 people across one of the most diverse regions in England, and runs hospital, community and specialist services including the new-build Midland Met Hospital. Its existing website had been in place for several years and no longer reflected the scale, ambition or patient-experience standards the Trust needed.
The Trust approached Platform81 in 2023 with a clear set of requirements:
- A modern, patient-first website that presented the Trust positively and professionally
- Full alignment with NHS brand guidelines and NHS Digital service standards
- Compliance with the WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standard in force at the time
- A content management system the Trust’s communications team could update independently, without developer support for day-to-day changes
- Robust hosting, security and support arrangements fit for a public-sector organisation handling high traffic volumes
- A clear path from legacy website to launch, including sitemap redesign, content migration and 301 redirects
The goal, as the Trust put it during briefing, was a website that would work as a genuine marketing and information tool – not just a brochure.
The Approach
Platform81 delivered the project end-to-end across four structured stages: Briefing, Design, Development, and Go-Live. Each stage included dedicated stakeholder meetings with Trust leads and sign-off gates before progressing.
Discovery & Design
We started with stakeholder sessions to agree user journeys, sitemap structure, and the key conversion funnels the site needed to support: from patient information lookups and service finders through to staff recruitment and Trust news.
The design phase produced high-fidelity Adobe XD mockups of the homepage and core internal templates. Every design decision: typography, contrast ratios, colour palette, hover and active states, focus indicators was made with WCAG 2.1 AA compliance baked in from the start, rather than retrofitted later.
Key design outcomes:
- A bespoke design system in line with the Trust’s brand and NHS visual identity
- Clear calls to action and a reduced-click information architecture
- Mobile-first responsive layouts, recognising that the majority of NHS website traffic is mobile
- An accessibility widget to give end users additional control over their reading experience
Build & CMS
The website was built on WordPress, configured with custom post types and flexible content blocks designed specifically for a non-technical NHS communications team. The priority throughout the build was CMS usability: the Trust’s comms team needed to be able to publish a news update, change a service page, or launch a campaign landing page without raising a developer ticket.
Technical highlights:
- Bespoke WordPress theme built from signed-off designs – no off-the-shelf template
- Custom flexible content blocks (headers, forms, galleries, document lists) the team can drag into any page
- Ajax-powered smart search across page titles, content and meta fields
- Draft, approval workflow and scheduled publishing built into the CMS
- Restricted-access pages with authenticated viewing where required
- SSL/TLS encryption across all data in transit
- Minimal-plugin architecture to reduce the security attack surface
Testing, Accessibility & Go-Live
Before launch, the site went through Platform81’s 90-point go-live checklist, covering cross-browser and cross-device testing, content accuracy, SEO basics, performance, and accessibility validation. CREST-approved penetration testing was offered as part of the secure-launch process to identify and close any vulnerabilities before the site went public.
The Trust’s communications team received full WordPress training on a staging environment before the site went live, with written documentation and access to the Platform81 helpdesk for any post-launch questions.
The Outcome
A Trust website is critical infrastructure. When a public health message needs to go out, or when an incident causes a spike in traffic, the site has to stay up. Platform81 provisioned and continues to manage the Trust’s hosting environment on a dedicated cloud VM with:
- 24/7 monitoring with automated failover
- Daily application-level backups, VM-level backups
- Configurable CPU, RAM and disk based on real-world traffic
- Firewalls at both application and network level, with all sensitive ports locked down
- CREST-approved penetration testing
Ongoing maintenance and support includes monthly WordPress and plugin updates, uptime monitoring, priority response times, out-of-hours emergency support and a monthly development time allocation for small enhancements.
The new Sandwell & West Birmingham NHS Trust website launched in October 2024 and has been delivering against its original objectives since go-live:
- Accessibility: Independent testing confirmed WCAG 2.1 AA compliance across core page templates at launch.
- Performance: Average speed score of 90+/100 for mobile and desktop at launch.
- Search visibility: the 301-redirect strategy preserved 100% of legacy rankings with an SEO traffic improvement of 13k monthly users over the last 2 years.
- Content velocity: The Trust’s comms team now publish many frequent updates independently – saving hundreds of hours and thousands of pounds in support tickets.
- Uptime: Website uptime since launch: 99.99%
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.
