Web design case studies
How we've taken on and managed professional, compliant, high-performing websites in the past.
KYDS Youth Drama Society: From Outdated Website To Refreshed Site
Yelland Digital helped the KYDS Youth Drama Society, an Essex-based amateur dramatics charity for young people, by taking full ownership of a website that, whilst around two decades old, had gone effectively unmaintained for the last ten years.
The Challenge
KYDS's website was around twenty years old and had not been meaningfully updated in the last decade. It was running badly outdated versions of PHP and WordPress, page load performance was incredibly poor, had no security hardening in place, and no backup system setup - leaving the charity not far from a website disaster. Furthermore, we noticed straight away that there was no cookie consent mechanism, no privacy policy, and no charity-status disclosures on their website, all of which exposed KYDS under UK GDPR, PECR, and charity law. With no single party being responsible for the site, and no clear route back from years of neglect, we stepped in to fix the site and even assisted with the management of the charity's email domain, which had little authentication controls in place, preventing email spoofing.
Our Approach
Yelland Digital took on full ownership of the charity's website, taking what worked from the old platform and gave it a full refresh, as well as updating to current, supported versions of WordPress and PHP, as well as implementing a proper backup regime and essential security hardening. As part of this, we carried out a complete redesign and content refresh of the site, restructuring pages, repairing broken forms and rebuilding the front end for a faster, cleaner experience. In parallel, we ran the site through a structured performance audit, addressing oversized and unoptimised images, render-blocking unnecessary third-party scripts and configured caching, which lifted the mobile performance score on Google’s PageSpeed Insights from 75 to 93 (which will in turn benefit both their site visitors and their google rankings). On the compliance side, we implemented cookie consent management, drafted and deployed a compliant cookie policy and privacy policy, and added the charity-status disclosures required under UK charity and consumer law. Furthermore, we deployed accessibility tooling and manual remediation, fixing invalid markup, adding missing ARIA labelling, and correcting undersized touch targets to move the site towards WCAG 2.2 Level AA conformance. Finally, as mentioned above, beyond the website itself, we took over DNS management and the configuration of the charity's hosting environment, and implemented DNS-based email authentication (SPF, DKIM, and a DMARC policy enforced at quarantine, with a scheduled path to reject) to stop the domain being used for spoofing, analysing incoming authentication reports to confirm attacks were being correctly blocked whilst legitimate mail continued to flow.
The Outcome
KYDS now has a single, accountable party managing its entire website and hosting setup: a modern, fast, accessible site running on secure, current software with proper backups in place, a documented compliance position covering cookies, privacy, and charity-status disclosures, and an email domain actively defended against spoofing. Arguably the biggest win, though, is a simpler one - the charity now has a website that’s much more friendly for its visitors, sets a better first impression and gives it a far stronger platform for recruiting new young members into its shows. What had been an unmanaged and outdated site is now a properly maintained asset, designed to meet the charity’s needs and objectives.