Rewilding Britain
Most people had never heard of rewilding.
Rewilding Britain needed a site that could explain the idea to a country that didn’t know it yet, and then hold up when the national press arrived. I led the build, and kept building it for the next four years.
From Squarespace to something that could take the weight
Rewilding Britain came to Kind on Squarespace, which was fine while they were small and a problem the moment they weren’t. I led development of the replacement, a Craft CMS build shaped around the way their traffic actually behaved.
Rewilding turns up in national news stories and on the radio with little warning. A site that is comfortable at a thousand visitors and falls over at fifty thousand is no use to an organisation whose job is catching public attention when it arrives.
A lot of content, and a way through it
Rewilding Britain publish constantly: news, research, practical guidance, project stories, campaign pages. The hard part was never a single template. It was working out how the pieces relate, so that an editor filing a story and a visitor following an interest both end up somewhere sensible.
Topics, not silos
One taxonomy runs across news, guidance and project stories, so following an interest like beavers or flooding crosses content types instead of dead-ending in a section.
Draft, check, publish
User groups let some people write and others approve. With Craft’s revisions behind it, the team got editorial oversight and a full audit trail without inventing a process alongside the CMS.
Built for the spike
Components were built to be cached and served cheaply, so a mention on the national news doesn’t decide whether the site stays up.
Four years of changes
I kept working on it long after launch, adding sections and reworking others as the organisation moved from explaining rewilding to organising it.
The Rewilding Network
Rewilding Britain had been building a network of projects and local groups since 2015, and it needed somewhere to live. We gave it a members area where practitioners could find each other, share what was working, and reach guidance and events that were never meant to be public.
The map gave the whole thing a shape people could take in at a glance. Not an argument about rewilding, but a country with pins in it.
The site won several awards, and Seth was a huge part of this success. He’s extremely skilled and knowledgeable, a good communicator, very efficient and a really lovely person to work with. I couldn’t recommend him more highly.
What happened next
Rewilding Britain relaunched in 2021, and went from a niche idea to a name people recognise. The figures below were measured and published by Kind, and cover the partnership as a whole rather than the code alone.
149%
more in online donations in the six months after launch.
988
rewilding projects registered with the Rewilding Network since 2021.
When Seth then developed the solutions required, there were very rarely any issues or unexpected design or functionality.
