As the world commemorates World AIDS Day on December 1st, to show support for people living with and affected by HIV and to remember those who lost their lives to AIDS, it seems an apt moment to reflect on a recent project that is close to our hearts.

We relaunched the HIV Glasgow Congress website on October 17^th, refreshing its design and structure ahead of the 2024 congress, which takes place 10-13 November 2024.

Want to know how we did it? Read on…

From its modest beginnings in 1992, HIV Drug Therapy Glasgow has become a beacon of the HIV congress calendar. What started as an open forum to help the world understand the science behind the disease has developed into an event that showcases innovative treatment solutions, altering HIV’s perception as a disease in crisis, to a disease in management.

The accompanying website is a key source of information that is frequented by delegates many months ahead of congress commencement. As of 30/11/2023, we’ve seen:-

• 1.1k new users in the past month

• 982 users found the site via an organic search.

• 361 users found the site via a direct search.

Tasked with overhauling the HIV Glasgow website, our objective was to ensure the site offers a fluid and intuitive experience for its users. Describing the previous website as, “cumbersome and clunky”, Sarah Turner (Congress Director) outlines her Website Refresh brief to the Creative and Digital team. “We wanted the website to be ‘futureproofed’, with a modern navigation. The design of the site had to align with the in-house rebrand we were implementing, offering a new look and feel. Following on from our 30 Years branding in 2022, we felt this was the perfect time to freshen things up!”.

Intuitive functionality and distinct design were at the forefront of our thinking. Discarding the lengthy side bar navigation for a concise horizontal bar allowed us to position the most important information at the top of the page, ensuring that it would be the first thing users see. This allowed more room within the body of the page to highlight important topics, the current one being ‘registration’. However, key to this website refresh was consolidation; archiving abstracts and posters into their respective tabs offered a clean new look to the website, giving users the chance to ‘discover more’, rather than being overwhelmed with numerous menu options.

The website was built using WordPress and offers the team the flexibility to make easy updates themselves. Sarah explains, “The new functionality allows us to easily restructure the site to meet the needs of our meeting planning calendar. We’re able to re-arrange menus at key timepoints in the lifecycle of our event and increase the profile of the topics and calls to action that are most relevant to our schedule.”

Our top website refresh tips:

• Ensure easy navigation to enable users to find what they need.

• Offer the user an engaging and responsive design, whatever their device.

• Consider your clients’ brand guidelines, to drive consistency across all materials.

• Apply metrics tracking to monitor site usage and really understand audience preferences.

• Always factor in a soft launch and post-launch analysis to your timeline, to allow for fine-tuning.

Explore HIV Glasgow and contact us for any
website design and build queries.