Background to Project
Weldmar Hospicecare is an independent charity that provides care to adults in Dorset with a life limiting illness, and support for their families. This care comes from community nurses and Day Services across the county, and at their Inpatient Unit in Dorchester.
We are incredibly proud to work with a such a prominent local charity that is close to our heart.
Our challenge
Weldmar Hospicecare invited us to tender for their website redevelopment in 2021. We were delighted to be chosen as the preferred agency to deliver the project. Having worked with the Dorset charity on the previous build of their website 5 years ago it was a natural progression to continue our excellent ongoing partnership and complete the redesign.
Throughout the project we worked closely with James O’Neill (Marketing and Communications Lead at Weldmar). A comprehensive website framework was developed to support and focus on the charities’ digital objectives. Among the requirements were to provide a suitable CMS that integrates with Raisers Edge (Weldmar’s donation portal).
Project goals also included an e-commerce platform to allow for online shopping, encourage engagement with the charities’ events and email sign-ups, and to maximise donation opportunities.

Our approach
Following in-depth digital strategy, personas and customer journey planning sessions we created a clear functional spec. The majority of the functionality from the previous website was still required, but the strategy sessions led the project brief and designs.
Our planning session were deliberately structured to help focus on meeting the needs of Weldmar’s target customers and create a functional specification. This enabled us to build a strategy to improve customer journeys and a create a brand new look and feel to the site.
Given the primary aim of the website is to encourage supporter engagement and donations the site needs to look good and be easy to use across all platforms. A strong ‘local’ focus was considered as part of the development to showcase the important work of Weldmar in the community through donations, charity events and shops.
We introduced significant design elements such as clear donate header button, bespoke block design to match brand colours and customisable accordion functionality.
The new website uses a bespoke CMS, enabling quick and easy adding, editing and updating of content by the Weldmar Hospicecare team.
The design is fully responsive and crafted with a modern look and feel consistent with the current branding and identity.
We look forward to continuing our successful partnership with the superb care provider. We’re delighted that Weldmar value the digital investment and have have agreed for Key Digital to supply double the digital marketing support going forward with SEO and Paid Advertising (PPC) assistance.
Our results



"Having originally built the Weldmar website myself in 2014-15 it was a really enjoyable process to be a part of bringing functionality in to the modern era, and giving the client our new content-building tools which they’ve used with great effect!"
Adam Montague, Senior Web Developer, Key Digital



Key project facts and figures
- Designed for Donations – Simple website design to encourage donations
- Fundraising Integration – Website integrates with internal database Raiser’s Edge.
"Before the technical work began, Key Digital worked closely with us to identify the wide variety of website users we have, and the experience we want them to have on the website based on their needs and feelings.
James O'Neill, Marketing and Communications Lead, Weldmar Hospicecare
This ranges from patients who may have just been referred to us and want to find out more about how we support them, through to people who want to take part in one of our fundraising events in memory of a loved one, donate items to our charity shops, or enrol on an education course with us.
Thanks to this groundwork, we have clearly defined user journeys on the new website, it has all the functionality we need, it's easy for us to manage the content, and – of course – it looks great!"