TEDx Northwich

Overview

TEDxNorthwich is a locally organised event, licensed by TED, that brings together live speakers and TED Talk videos to spark discussion and connection within the Northwich community, focusing on sharing "ideas worth spreading"

Problem Statement

TEDxNorthwich needed a modern, accessible, and user-friendly website that:

Provided a marketing platform that raised awareness of the event and ticket availability
Provided users with a method of applying to speak at future events
Included simple management of speaker applications and content
Included an area for users to view and promote upcoming speakers and watch videos of previous events
Was mobile-friendly and SEO-optimised

Additional requirements

Photography services for speaker rehearsals and the main event

The Events page displays upcoming speakers for the current years event and speaker details with video footage of all previous talks. The page could be filtered by the user to display only specific events.

My Process

1. Research & Discovery

User & Business Needs Analysis:

Conducted stakeholder interviews to understand organisational goals
Identified key user types and user permission requirements
Determined required functionality

Audit & Analytics Review:

Analysed competitor websites for best practices

2. Design & Architecture

Information architecture:

Sketched out content structures and content interactions
Organised frontend and backend content touch points
Laid a foundation for SEO optimised URL structure

Low-Fidelity Wireframes:

Created wireframes focussing on user needs
Ensured logical flow from homepage to speaker application pages

High-Fidelity Designs:

Designed an interactive prototype in Figma for testing and stakeholder review
Implemented brand colours, revised typography, and imagery
Ensured design related WCAG accessibility compliance

TEDxNorthwich website admin area, displaying a list of recent speaker applications — The custom built admin area for TEDxNorthwich, providing simple links for creating new events, speaker listings, uploading talk videos and accessing recently added content.

3. Development & Launch

Built the site on Drupal CMS for flexibility and scalability
Implemented WCAG accessibility compliance
Integrated SEO best practices (semantic, HTML, meta tags, load performance optimisation)
Tested responsiveness and layout performance across devices and browsers

TEDxNorthwich's website speaker application portal area — The websites custom speaker application portal listed all video applications submitted through the websites public frontend. The admin area displayed here allowed easy and secure access to applicant details, access to the video submissions and tools for evaluating and shortlisting applications.

TEDxNorthwich website video administration screen design — The website's admin area provided a clean interface for managing current video content within the site.

The interface design for TEDxNorthwich's website footer

Key Improvements:

✅ Effective ticket sale awareness, providing event ticket sell-out within two days

✅ Over 70 speaker video application submissions for the events first year

✅ Accessibility Compliance: Passed WCAG 2.1 AA standards

✅ Mobile Optimisation: Fully responsive across all devices

Reflection & Takeaways

This project underscored the critical role of early-stage content architecture planning. Mapping the relationships between speaker application submissions, event year taxonomy, curated upcoming speakers, and archived talks was essential to support intuitive navigation, efficient content retrieval, and consistent user experience across varied user journeys.