Crossroads Care Northern Ireland.
Crossroads Care Northern Ireland is a not-for-profit organisation that has been supporting carers and people with care needs since 1979. Operating across Northern Ireland, they provide a wide range of services – from domiciliary care and young carer support to befriending programmes and training – all centred around keeping people connected, independent, and looked after in their own communities.
Project overview.
Client: Crossroads Care Northern Ireland
Few organisations carry the breadth of work that Crossroads Care NI does. Over more than four decades they have grown from a single care service into an organisation running multiple distinct programmes, each serving a different group of people – from children providing care for a family member, to older adults at risk of isolation, to the care workers they recruit, train, and support.
The challenge with a website for an organisation like this isn’t simply making it look better. It’s making sure that someone arriving on the site – a worried parent, a referring health worker, a prospective care worker, an older person looking for support – can immediately find what they’re looking for and understand what Crossroads can do for them. With so many services under one roof, that clarity doesn’t happen by accident.
The project was funded through grant support, which shaped the approach from the outset. The budget was fixed, and there was no scope for anything extra. But equally important was making sure that what we built could grow – so that as Crossroads secured future funding and expanded their offer, the site could expand with them without starting from scratch.
Scope of work.
- User experience and information architecture
- Website design
- Custom illustration
- Web development
- Hosting and maintenance
Our approach.
Structure and navigation
The first thing to get right was the structure. Crossroads runs several distinct services – domiciliary care, young carer support, the In Your Prime befriending programme, a children’s sensory room, training, and recruitment – each with its own audiences, referral processes, and information needs. These couldn’t be bundled together or buried. Each one needed its own clear home.
We approached the navigation with that in mind, building a menu structure that lets visitors move directly to the service relevant to them without having to work out where it might sit or wade through content that isn’t for them. A domiciliary care service user and someone making a Young Carer referral are completely different visitors; the site needed to work equally well for both.
Design and illustration
Crossroads Care NI didn’t have a large bank of photography to draw from – something that’s common for organisations working in sensitive care environments, where photography of the people they support isn’t always appropriate or available. Rather than fill the site with generic stock imagery, we sourced photography carefully and supplemented it with a set of custom illustrations.
The illustrations gave the site warmth and character without relying on pictures that might feel impersonal or disconnected from the communities Crossroads actually serves. They also gave the design a consistent visual language that carries across the different service areas, helping the site feel unified even though each service section has its own content and purpose.
Development and building for growth
Because the project was grant-funded, we worked within a defined budget throughout. That meant making considered decisions about what to prioritise, and being clear about what was in scope and what could follow later. But it also meant building in a way that made later additions straightforward, so that if further funding comes in and new features or services need to be added, the work doesn’t require unpicking what’s already there.
The CMS was set up to give the Crossroads team as much control as possible over their own content, across all of their service areas. They shouldn’t need to come back to us every time something changes.
The results.
The new website gives Crossroads Care NI a presence that reflects the scale and quality of what they do. Visitors can now navigate to the right service quickly and clearly, whether they’re a health professional making a referral, a young person looking for support, or someone exploring care options for a family member.
The build came in within the grant budget, and the site is structured to accommodate future growth as the organisation continues to develop. The content management setup means the team can keep the site current themselves – an important consideration for a charity where resource is always carefully managed.