Building a socially-led website for Bulmers
One of our recent projects for Bulmers Cider has been to design and build their very first website. But they didn’t just want a bog standard website – they wanted a socially led site that reflected their personality, while showcasing their colourful range of ciders, and the rich history behind this exquisitely British brand.
Being colourful is an important part of Bulmers’ brand identity, with its ‘Live Colourful’ ethos, so we knew this would play a huge part in the site. For months before the site launched, we asked Bulmers’ fans and followers to send us their most colourful pictures using the #livecolourful hashtag, which we collated from multiple social channels. This gave us a huge bank of UGC – as well as a continuing pipeline of new content – allowing us to place social at the heart of this website, and provide our design and creative technology teams, guided by Jake Lee and Matthew Payne, with a host of beautiful and unique assets to use.
We focused heavily on the attitude of the brand. Aside from the homepage, two key sections push the brand’s content and activities – the blog and campaign pages (‘Fun Stuff’). The blog allows Bulmers to post not just content on social platforms but within the site as well, helping push its SEO too.
The campaign pages have been designed to live not just within the site but also in social platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. Instead of having to build duplicate experiences for each social network the pages can adapt to their environment, and show/hide content depending on where it is being viewed, allowing for more users to see the content.
The site has been designed to be as lightweight as possible due to the responsive requirements of today’s mobile user base. As well as this underlying mobile backbone, it’s easily adaptable to upcoming campaigns and brand initiatives based on an updatable, modular front-end and structured information layout. The clean minimal style reflects the modern, fresh and predominant audience of young adults that Bulmers attracts.
This brand site is a true innovation in web builds, it has the flexibility of working in conjunction with major social media platforms, whilst still maintaining the creative integrity of a beautifully designed website. Putting social thinking at the heart of the site allows Bulmers to demonstrate that it is an innovative digital brand, and the modular UX design ensures that this site will be future proof for a very long time.