This year we worked on the new website for The Clink Charity and Restaurants.

The Clink is more than just restaurants or just a charity. Both these aspects are symbiotically linked. Their restaurants are situated within working prisons, with all of the food prepared and served by prisoners undertaking training. In partnership with Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service, The Clink works towards reducing reoffending rates.

When designing and building the new site, we identified that it was important to convey the feeling of both these aspects in the design and usability. The Clink also provides event catering and has multiple supporting projects, including gardens to grow produce for their kitchens. The new site needed to rationalise and present well all this information regarding their work. One solution to this included navigational boxes to lead the user through a process, reducing the amount of information which could otherwise be overwhelming.

The new site was also made with consideration for the locations and instructions for visitors. As some of The Clink’s restaurants are within prison walls, there are security rules and restrictions to follow, whilst bearing in mind that the processes surrounding visiting one of The Clink’s restaurants should be more approachable.

The final site includes:

• Fully responsive and Retina capability,
• Full Content Management System (CMS),
• Custom integrations for The Clink’s dual booking system, where different restaurants have different booking providers,
• SEO friendly build, and proactive redirects of traffic sent to the old site’s pages to the new site’s equivalents,
• Integration with Mailchimp for newsletter and social sharing of posts,
• Blog system with dynamic categories for News, Events, Recipes and Press Releases,
• Press section for download of pre-approved assets,
• Online shop e-commerce integration.