Fellowship Afloat

Based on a converted lightship moored off the Essex coast and surrounded by nature, Fellowship Afloat is an outdoor activity centre like no other. It's been offering outdoor adventures to people of all ages for over 50 years, providing a wide range of activities including sailing, powerboating, canoeing, climbing, archery, and nature studies.

It's also a place that's very special to me as I spent many summers and weekends there when I was younger, going sailing, getting covered in mud and generally having a great time.

Drupal website – 2013

In 2013, I was asked by Fellowship Afloat to rebuild their website. My brief was to create a site which communicated the fun and excitement of being at the centre, could be easily content managed, worked well on mobiles, and provided a modern base to add further functionality.

They were also finding more and more potential guests wanted to book activities and courses online, so the site would need some kind of booking functionality.

↑ Wireframes of a section of the homepage and an activity page.

Over the course of a year I worked closely with Fellowship Afloat's staff and trustees to design and build their new site. They have a few quite different audiences, so the site structure needed to work well for each, while still giving a good overview of who Fellowship Afloat are and what makes them special.

↑ Design mockups showing a section of the homepage and a second-level page.

The previous website didn't feature many photos, so I deliberately put in as many photos as possible, including a background video in the homepage hero banner, to communicate the wide range of activities available and the excitement of staying on the lightship.

I decided to build the site on Drupal 7 as it was well supported, easy to use and had all the features they needed. I also developed a system for creating block-based layouts in Drupal, something which had not been done in that way before. This method quickly became the standard way we built complex layouts at the agency I was working for at the time.

Wordpress website – 2023

Ten years later, with Drupal 7 close to the end of being supported, we had a decision to make: either upgrade to the latest version of Drupal or move to another platform. Either option would require a complete rebuild and migration so we had the opportunity to pick the best solution for (hopefully) the next decade.

After evaluating all the options, including moving to a static-site generator or a platform like Squarespace, we decided to go with Wordpress as it's easy to use and much better known than Drupal – they would have no trouble getting outside support if needed.

Content migration strategy

There are two options when migrating a website:

1. Completely audit and revamp the content, developing a new information architecture and content plan. This results in a much higher quality website but can be a significant amount of work, especially if there's a lot of content
2. Move the content as-is, keeping the previous structure. This is quicker and easier, but results in basically the same site as before, with potentially outdated content and poor structure.

As Fellowship Afloat were in the middle of a major project to redevelop the lightship and didn't have capacity to rewrite lots of content, and a key goal of the project was to move from Drupal 7 before became unsupported, we opted for the second option.

I built the site using Wordpress 6 with full site editing. I'd not used it before and was pleasantly surprised how much easier it made things. I migrated the content from Drupal to Wordpress with a series of migration plugins, moving pages, posts, taxonomy, users etc.

↑ The finished website, built with the Gutenberg block editor.

The process wasn't perfect and struggled with Drupal custom fields, so I still had to go through every page, fixing missing or broken content. Despite being very busy, the entire Fellowship Afloat team also pitched in, working hard to ready the content for launch. The site went live in early December 2023.

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