RICK

RICK brings arts and culture into schools and local communities in Weert while providing amateur artists with the opportunity to develop their talents. To better showcase RICK’s broad social role and make course registration easier, we developed a completely new website.

The first challenge was translating the existing visual identity, which had primarily been developed for print, into a digital environment. The brand relied on bold, solid colour blocks, but on a website colours also need to work well for people with visual impairments. As a result, the existing visual identity could not simply be transferred one-to-one.

Instead of using solid colour blocks, we introduced varying levels of transparency. This preserved the recognisable look and feel of the brand while improving contrast and readability for all users.

Through a combination of in-person and online workshops with the client, we further developed the existing visual identity. Subtle animations gave the website a contemporary feel, while we also advised on the content structure and the most intuitive way to organise information.

The new website creates more space for personal stories from participants and real-life examples of projects, allowing RICK to demonstrate the impact that arts and culture have on people’s everyday lives.

The website was built in WordPress, enabling the RICK team to manage courses, projects, news articles, and the events calendar through the CMS. FAQs and teacher profiles were developed as centrally managed content that can be added to any page using flexible content blocks. This means information only needs to be entered once and remains automatically up to date across the entire website.

Basic course information is retrieved through an integration with the external course management system Tribe. Within the CMS, this information can then be enriched with additional content and imagery. Because calendars, projects, courses, and news articles all require different page layouts, we developed flexible content blocks that allow content managers to easily build pages themselves.

Using Gravity Forms, one of the most widely used WordPress form plugins, custom forms can be created with ease. Thanks to its integration with Tribe, course registrations are automatically forwarded to the administration system.

For the website search, we implemented Algolia, allowing visitors to find the right course or information much faster than with the standard WordPress search functionality. Algolia also has built-in typo tolerance, ensuring that searches containing spelling mistakes still return relevant results.

The website’s flexible architecture enables the organisation to easily add new content and continue growing the platform as future needs evolve. From the initial kick-off and wireframes through to the final design, the project followed a collaborative approach with both user experience and the client’s objectives at its core.

To support this process, we worked closely with the RICK team throughout the project, maintaining short communication lines. Because designers, developers, and project managers were all communicating directly with the client, questions were answered quickly and decisions could be made without unnecessary delays.

The result is a website that clearly communicates RICK’s social impact while encouraging visitors to actively engage with arts and culture. At the same time, the organisation now benefits from a flexible platform that makes managing and expanding content both simple and efficient, while helping visitors find what they are looking for more quickly.