Urban Pursuit. A clear way in for schools and families.

Urban Pursuit was founded in Bristol in 2011 by Neil and Emma Dennison. Neil had been a secondary teacher for fifteen years, latterly an assistant head, and is a qualified mountain leader and climbing instructor. Emma came from the council’s behaviour support team.

Schools refer young people who are at risk of exclusion, mostly aged 11 to 16. They spend half a day, a day or two days a week with Urban Pursuit alongside school, doing adventure sports in small groups, and the school gets written feedback after every session. The work is built around five things: identity, getting on with others, managing yourself, discovering their talents, and aspirations.

So the website has two quite different readers: teachers deciding whether to refer a pupil, and young people and their families wondering what they’ve been signed up for.

In November 2012 Neil asked us to replace the website he had made himself. He wrote the structure and the words, and sent us the phrases schools type into Google when they’re looking for help: alternative education, key stage 3, adventure education, Bristol.

We built the homepage around the questions schools ask: how quickly a pupil can start, what Urban Pursuit adds, what the impact is, and what “taking risks” actually means. Every page was given a title and description in the words schools search for. The site worked on phones from the start, which in 2013 was still worth mentioning, and it went live on 12 March 2013 without losing any of the old site’s place in Google.

Seven years later it was still the first result on Google for “urban pursuit”, and second for “alternative education Bristol”.

For the next nine years we looked after the site and the people using it. When the office took on updates, we gave them editor logins and a short guide, rather than full access, so a slip couldn’t break the design. We added a privacy notice when the data protection rules changed in 2018, a vacancies page with a notice that switches itself off on a set date, and new team members and news as they came.

Some of the most useful advice was about what not to build. When they wanted to take bookings for a summer school, we suggested Eventbrite rather than a booking system on the website: less to set up and pay for, and no customer details held on the site.

By 2018 Neil felt the design was getting tired, and the theme it was built on needed an old version of PHP, which was becoming a security risk. In 2019 we moved the site to our own faster hosting with a security certificate, and kept the old theme running on a separate setup of its own until a proper rebuild was possible, rather than patching it for ever.

In December 2019 the team wrote down what they wanted from a new site, and it was refreshingly short:

They also wanted their own staff to be able to update it, and the site to reflect where the organisation had got to. The project took a while to get going, and in August 2021 their development lead, Dan Potter, now the chief executive, wrote:

When we worked through the content together in a shared document, they set out what the site was for:

• Show referring schools their impact and professionalism, and give them the information they need to get involved
• Put young people and their families at ease, with other people’s experiences and practical information about what to expect
• Make referring a young person clear and easy

Then it paused once more, while Urban Pursuit created a new brand and a new film. It made sense to wait and build the site once, around the finished brand, rather than twice.

The new brand arrived in spring 2022: a bold orange logo with an “active person” mark, and a style guide. We gathered the words first, because a design is much better when the content is there to shape it, then designed the pages in Figma, where Dan and Aaron Beale from the team could leave comments on the design itself.

A few decisions shaped the site, and each had a reason:

• Near the top of the homepage, a plain sentence says what Urban Pursuit is, an alternative education provider in Bristol, for anyone arriving for the first time and for people searching for exactly that
• Real photographs for people, always. Stock pictures of groups of young people would be misleading, so stock is used only for places
• One menu for phones and computers, so a link added for one can never be missing from the other
• News pictures can be any shape, so the team never has to crop a photo before posting
• The brand’s “table top” look, with kit laid out around photographs, saved for a few pages, because on every page it would have made adding new photos much harder
• Plenty of space and nothing cluttered, with links in a light blue chosen to sit opposite the brand’s orange on the colour wheel

Urban Pursuit had a new film made by the filmmaker Nick Street. For the homepage we chose the best scenes, with no logo and nobody talking to camera, darkened them so the heading stays easy to read on top, and cut them into a silent loop, so the first thing visitors see is Urban Pursuit in action.

The video is sent to each device in the format it handles best, and phones that can’t play it show a still image instead. On a big screen it can look a little soft: a trade-off we talked through and agreed on, because it plays smoothly on every kind of device. These days more than two thirds of the visits from Google come from phones.

Urban Pursuit’s staff spend most days out with young people, so updating the site had to be quick and hard to get wrong. They change the words and pictures through simple screens in the dashboard, while the layout itself stays out of harm’s way. The new site went live on 11 October 2022. A week later we ran a training session, which the team recorded so anyone new can watch it later.

Since then we’ve added the pieces they’ve needed, built into the site rather than bolted on with extra plugins:

• A vacancies banner for the homepage, with its own end date, that the team switch on themselves
• A template for new programme pages, with two short walkthrough videos. The team have used it for five programmes, from English and maths tuition to a bike repair club run in schools
• Links to policies that always point to the latest version, so a school’s bookmark never breaks
• A board page, a documents area, and a redesigned education programme page