A home for 50 years of British advertising

British Arrows has celebrated British advertising since 1976. It's a not-for-profit organisation, run by a small team, that brings the whole UK industry together once a year to champion and reward the best in the business.

Having already worked with the team on the previous iteration of their website, and with the 50th anniversary celebrations coming up, British Arrows once again recruited us to redesign and build a new site.

We audited the old site, identified the strengths and weaknesses of each section and compiled a list of goals for each page. This resulted in comprehensive wireframes that we used to map out, test and improve on every feature.

One of the major issues with the old homepage is that it would go stale very quickly, with no way of promoting content to the heading. Using Craft CMS, we re-built the homepage to give British Arrows more control over updating the editorial content. The team can now pin news articles and features to the top of the site, keeping everything fresh in the lead-up to each event.

Instead of several disjointed pages, each event now lives on one dynamic page, built from blocks that can be set to show before the event, after it, or always. The page grows and changes as the event approaches, then again once it’s passed.

The original archive was only built to handle events from the last 5 years or so. However, the 50th anniversary rebuild gave us the opportunity to create a site that could accommodate all 50 years of winners, which is the equivalent of 4,008 awards across 3,568 films. This called for better filtering, search and performance.

The British Arrows team manages all the winners, films, credits and related companies from an Airtable database. This acts as one definitive source that any member of the team can easily navigate and update. We achieved this by building a custom Craft CMS integration that syncs the data into the site.