Centre for Ageing Better Drupal Web Development
The Centre for Ageing Better is an independent charitable foundation funded by The National Lottery Community Fund. It creates change in policy and practice informed by evidence, working with partners across England to improve employment, housing, and combat ageism. The organisation believes that more people living longer represents a huge opportunity for society, and that everyone deserves to live a good later life.
Brief
The Centre for Ageing Better set an ambitious website engagement KPI for their 2025–26 campaign year. The target was defined around website engagement, meaningful interactions with content that supports the organisation's mission to reach people with evidence-based resources and policy insights.
As part of their multi-year web development and digital marketing retainer, Strange was challenged to help the organisation's in-house web and marketing team hit that target.
Approach
Our work spanned the full stack, from server infrastructure to search UX, guided by a commitment to evidence-led decision making and technical best practice.
User Behaviour Research & Analysis
Before writing a line of code, we invested in understanding how people were actually using the site. This included facilitated user testing sessions, qualitative research to surface friction points, and deep quantitative analysis using GA4, Microsoft Clarity and HotJar. We ensured robust cookie consent, tracking, and tagging was in place so the data we were acting on could be trusted.
Best Practice Drupal Development
Strange has extensive Drupal expertise, and we applied it rigorously throughout, writing clean, maintainable, standards-compliant code that the Ageing Better team can build on with confidence.
On-Site Search Optimisation
A sophisticated SOLR search configuration was implemented, including custom boosting, relevance tuning, and query analysis. For a research-heavy organisation whose users are looking for specific reports, guidance, and resources, getting search right is directly tied to engagement, and we treated it as a priority.
Technical SEO & AEO
We implemented comprehensive technical optimisations for both traditional search engine optimisation and answer engine optimisation, ensuring Ageing Better's content is discoverable, parsable, and surfaced correctly by both search engines and AI-powered answer tools.
Accessibility
All development work was delivered to WCAG 2.2 AA standards, reflecting both Ageing Better's inclusive values and their obligation to reach a broad audience including older users who may rely on assistive technologies.
UX Design & Responsive Frontend Development
Working from user research insights, we designed and built responsive frontend experiences that reduce friction and guide users to the content most relevant to them, across every device and screen size.
Fast, Parsable & Indexable Frontend
Performance is both an SEO signal and a direct driver of engagement. We optimised for Core Web Vitals, ensuring fast load times and a frontend that search engines and AI crawlers can efficiently read and index.
Information Architecture Optimisations
We worked with the team to rationalise and improve the site's IA, making it easier for users to navigate a rich content library and reducing the drop-off that comes from poor findability.
Hosting: Acquia & Cloudflare
The site runs on Acquia's Drupal hosting platform, fronted by Cloudflare. This combination provides enterprise-grade security, resilience, and performance, including robust mitigation of bot traffic that would otherwise distort analytics and waste crawl budget.
Training, Support & Consultation
Technical excellence only goes so far if a client's in-house team can't build on it. We provided thorough training, hands-on support, and strategic consultation to Ageing Better's web and marketing team, helping them develop capability and confidence to manage and grow the site themselves.
Result
The results exceeded all expectations. Against an ambitious website engagement KPI set for the 2025–26 campaign year, the Centre for Ageing Better exceeded it by 10x.
This outcome reflects the cumulative effect of getting the fundamentals right: credible data and tracking, a technically sound Drupal build, a search experience that surfaces the right content, a frontend that loads fast and works for everyone, and a client team who had the tools and knowledge to make the most of it all.
Testimonial
Strange has been our lead digital agency for seven years, running our Drupal websites, Digital Asset Management application as well as our digital marketing including SEO/GEO/AEO. As a National Lottery-funded charity we go out to pitch regularly and have chosen to work with Strange every time. They've exceeded the engagement KPI stretch targets we've set them, plan considered work to often tight deadlines, and consistently go further than the brief asks because they care about our cause as much as we do. I’m continually impressed by their communication and commitment to their work.
Let's chat. Tell us a bit about your project.
If you prefer to speak with someone, call 01202 203160 or if you'd like to book a 30 min meeting to see if we can help just let us know and we'll arrange a call with one of our Directors.