Mossley Civic Society approached us to help them create a web presence for some National Lottery funded “trail boards” around the town. They had worked with four different schools in the area to make four heritage trails, each of which was going to have physical signs put up to create short circular walking tours.

The more we dug into this though through meetings with the civic society the more we found communications issues to address. Who are the civic society? What is Mossley Heritage Centre? Who runs the various Mossley heritage facebook groups? Why does Mossley’s history matter?

Working with the group we changed the brief to create a new brand to encompass and consolidate all these projects, which were being run by the same people but with very different (or no) branding. This included a rebrand of the heritage centre including new signage and leaflets! It’s not every project you start with a website brand and end up making a museum sign.

After discovering that none of the civic society were very tech savvy with an average age over 70, we created the website and web versions of the trail boards using a static site generator called Jekyll. This means there’s nothing to update or maintain – Facebook is used for blogging where their audience already is.

Mossley Heritage Society don’t keep visitor numbers but reported a big rise in people visiting the centre following the refresh. The boards are still there to this day and are a major Mossley landmark. Pulling all these elements together into one place gave the civic society a renewed sense of purpose and helped communicate clearly what they do to the whole town.