A New Website for St Luke’s – Sheffield’s Hospice

Year

2025-26

Client

St Luke’s – Sheffield’s Hospice

Industry

Non-profit, charity

Services

Web development, SEO, Copywriting & Design

St Luke’s Tribute platform

Before launching the main St Luke’s website, we rebuilt and modernised their Tribute site into a dedicated digital space where families can honour loved ones, share memories and photos, and raise vital donations in support of St Luke’s care – strengthening community connection while providing St Luke’s with a valuable long-term fundraising tool.

The challenge

The original St Luke’s website had become difficult to use. With over 2,000 pages, visitors often had to click through too many layers to find what they needed. This was a problem for a wide audience with very different needs – from a family seeking urgent care information to a supporter wanting to donate or find a local shop.

St Luke’s needed a future-ready site that met strict accessibility and regulatory requirements. The backend also needed to be more flexible, as the internal marketing team found it hard to manage content, comms, events and reporting. We were given a strict six-month window to overhaul the entire digital experience before the end of the 2025/26 financial year.

Our approach

We loved getting stuck in with the St Luke’s team right from the start. Using a “MoSCoW” format, we held workshops to define exactly what the new site needed to do for every department. It was a rewarding process that made sure everyone’s voice was heard and that every requirement was captured before we wrote a single line of code.

Our development team chose Umbraco 17 to give the hospice a site with no limits on scale and total independence from agency support. We created a 68-step pre-migration plan to protect their search engine rankings and ensure no vital information was lost. Throughout the six-month build, we held weekly updates to keep everything on track for the March 31st launch.

Before the new site went live, we performed extensive User Acceptance Testing (UAT) to resolve any issues. A structured launch-day checklist ensured a smooth transition on the day, followed by a two-week monitoring programme. This allowed us to protect their organic search performance and minimise any risks during the initial go-live period.

The design and experience

We worked closely with the hospice's in-house designer to make the site feel "unmistakably St Luke's”. Their signature pink, blue, white and purple palette is carried consistently across every page, while a media-rich approach brings the design to life through hero banners, carousels and galleries.

The layout has been optimised to present services clearly, with integrated stories to showcase the human-centred nature of St Luke’s work. A complete restructure reduced the website from 2,735 indexed pages to 481, retaining all live events, blogs and news from the previous three years and significantly improving the overall user experience (UX).

Accessibility was a core priority throughout. We included the ReciteMe toolbar and enhanced the site’s semantic structure to ensure full compatibility with screen readers. Navigation is now fully responsive, with a layered mobile experience that makes finding support just as easy on a phone as it is on a desktop.

Strategic SEO and AI optimisation

We didn’t just migrate old content; we performed a full-scale audit and architectural overhaul. By mapping out a keyword strategy based on what patients, clinical teams, and supporters actually search for, we redefined the page hierarchy and optimised key content. We introduced content hubs that group related services together, improving topical authority and significantly reducing the click volume for every user.

To ensure the site remains optimised, we incorporated robust SEO controls directly into the CMS, allowing editors to manage custom metadata and page-level titles. We also built a custom AI tool that reads new content to suggest meta descriptions and image alt tags. It follows prescribed brand rules to ensure every suggestion sounds like St Luke’s while meeting the latest best practices for Google and AI search.

Built for reliability and performance

We built in dedicated features to keep the site running smoothly for both the hospice team and their visitors, ensuring the platform is as functional as it is visual.

Feature highlights

Making it easier to donate to St Luke’s

Supporting the hospice is now simpler and more secure. We built a dedicated donation subdomain to keep the user journey focused. Whether a supporter is giving a one-off gift or setting up a monthly donation, the process is seamless, and it includes built-in Gift Aid capture to make every contribution go further.

We didn't just focus on the visitor; we also built a custom dashboard for the St Luke’s team. This tool allows them to track donations and Gift Aid contributions in real-time. It’s designed to be fast and functional, letting the team pull and export detailed reports in a few clicks to support their fundraising goals.

A lasting impact for Sheffield

For the FWD Motion team, this project was about more than delivering a new website. Working closely with St Luke’s, we set out to create something for everyone connected to their work – from the people receiving care to the teams, volunteers and supporters who make it possible.

Our Digital Marketing Lead, Heather Hearn-Poole, played a key role in shaping that vision, ensuring the site didn’t just look good, but functioned as a vital, accessible resource for the city. She commented:

"Working with St Luke’s has been a real achievement. All of our departments have collaborated to build a website fit for the future. From copy, to UX to design, to development and extensive stakeholder engagement, it’s truly been about people, not just the technology.

We’ve got to know the amazing team of people who work at St Luke’s and keep Sheffield’s Hospice going. Their passion, care and engagement with the website gave us the foundation to build user journeys for all, from patient to clinician to volunteer or supporter.

By using the latest SEO and development tools, we've made sure people can find help and support pages exactly when they need them, sometimes at their most vulnerable moments. It’s a project that genuinely supports our Sheffield community, and I’m proud we’ve delivered a site that’s ready for their next chapter through to 2029."