Royal Entomological Society

The Royal Entomological Society website needed a fresh, new look to represent an updated, modern brand aesthetic. The Society also needed an extensible solution to support their growing business needs; membership subscriptions, e-commerce, donations, and both paid and free events.

For nearly 200 years, the Royal Entomological Society has led the promotion of insect science. Eminent scientists such as Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace were Fellows of the Society. Today, the world’s insect scientists continue to recognise its importance. Election as a Fellow is one of the most prestigious honours in entomology worldwide.

Design evolution

The journey of the RES website has been quite dramatic over the last decade. It has transformed from a highly technical, enthusiast site through to a smart, modern, highly visual site with an emphasis on marketing the organisation and promoting it’s membership origins.

The new brand

A bold, dark, modern brand was created by Threerooms, which has the potential to radically transform the look of the organisation.

We needed to translate some of the brand aesthetics into components, which could be used effectively on the web to create a similar feel to the print-oriented branding work, without being difficult for content editors to use.

Some elements were more suitable than others; we found simple ways to achieve bold headers with ‘microscope’ highlight effects, and visually interesting animated gradients; representing irredescance, an entomological phenomena! The balance of light and dark was crucial so the whole site didn’t feel too dark to read in content areas, whilst allowing the bold colour pallete to look vibrant on darker panels.

More than just a pretty face

WordPress was chosen over other platforms as it presented a cost-effective solution to development requirements for the new functionality of the site. Several highly regarded, tried-and-tested plugins could be used for the brunt of the heavy lifting, avoiding prohibitively expensive (in both financial terms and timescales) custom development work.

Importing

Before our overhaul of the site could commence, we had to import existing membership data from an antiquated reporting system built on a now defunct database engine. Getting the data out and into the new database in a clean enough form was a major challenge, but vital to enable WordPress to act as the Membership hub for the future.

Reporting

Scheduling reports to get an up-to-date picture on the Society’s subscriptions, sales, and donations was key functionality for the new site. WordPress facilitated the functionality to provide all of this information, as well as a much needed Customer Relationship Management role for Members.

The new site and the National Insect Week site, also designed by Headscape, are an online presence worthy of the Society’s role and reputation.