Design, Build & Hosting for The Centre for Climate Repair — "Refreshing the experience in Drupal"

Aim/goals: The Centre wanted a one-stop-shop site people go to first — clear, measurable, and autonomous. Key needs: understand traffic, let visitors find what they need without asking staff, and let the Centre manage conferences, logos and research projects itself. Accessibility and responsible cookie use were essential, and since most content is added manually by the Climate Repair team, a better editorial experience was central to that autonomy.

Audit of the existing site: The Drupal 10.3.1 site had 9 content types (Basic page, Event, News, People, PhD Studentship, Projects, Publications, Vacancies, Weekly Roundups), 327 content items, 4 taxonomies, 5 media types, 8 paragraph types, 5 roles and 4 users. Listing pages were Views blocks assembled into paragraph layouts.

Key observations:

• No search, contact form, analytics or metrics.
• Entity queue made adding content to lists a multi-step chore.
• Many pages used hand-styled HTML to work around theme bugs and limitations.
• The editorial process was too complex and abstract — only two users actively managed content.
• Mailchimp lists existed but weren't integrated with the site.
• Events were frequent but hard to add.
• Hosting was overpriced (two web servers, one in use) and accessible only via FTP or a web interface — no source control, so deployments caused significant disruption.
   

Challenges: The site needed a modern refresh and better content architecture. Content was hidden behind multiple clicks and surfaced at the wrong moment. Editors couldn't trust that drafts matched the published result and lacked components for the layouts they wanted — so pages filled up with hand-styled embedded HTML that was hard to update and off-brand.

Method/approach: A new design came first, allowing fast iteration on what to improve and where existing content fell short; structural content changes ran alongside it for coherence.

Content types were assessed for fitness for purpose: unused legacy types (the "Projects" type, the old "associates" page) were removed or streamlined, with redirects protecting SEO. Content was enhanced with additional fields — academic and job titles on People, extra event fields, free-text News authors, menu descriptions.

New flexible components were added — Resources paragraph, events slider block, people select block, breadcrumbs — and layouts consolidated into a small set of reusable ones, steering editors away from hand-styled HTML toward structured content. Entity queue was replaced with component-driven nested paragraphs, so ordering happens on the same page.

Best-practice configuration was added: stronger SEO profile, automated accessibility checking, responsive image styles, Search API (database) search, Google Analytics with EU cookie compliance (Klaro), and automated redirects.

The site also moved to a Code Enigma–managed server, significantly reducing hosting cost and enabling automated deployments.

Design requirements: Figma designs for key templates — Homepage, Research, Event, Content page, News directory, News article/long reads, Team directory, Team biography — plus components, variables, navigation, header, footer, sticky sub-nav and core layout variations.

Outcomes: The site was upgraded rather than rebuilt, avoiding unnecessary technical debt and cost while keeping integrations largely intact. It delivered meaningful UX improvements, stronger SEO, automated accessibility checking, responsive images, robust search and analytics — a gold-standard editorial experience on a modern, supportable Drupal 11 platform, with ongoing support so the Centre stays autonomous and can measure success as its work expands.