The Mercers’ Company is the Premier Livery Company of the City of London. Incorporated by Royal Charter in 1394, the Company’s original aim was to act as a Trade Association for general merchants. Nowadays, although the Company no longer has any trade to control, they exist as a charitable institution, supporting a variety of different causes.

To allow the Mercers’ Company to be better positioned within today’s digital climate it was important to conduct a complete overhaul of their website.

The previous site no longer accurately represented, or supported their core activities and they felt the design was outdated. We wanted to give them a platform that would be built around a new flexible CMS to better support their workflow and audience engagement, specifically with reference to grant application processing, whilst offering a robust basis for future digital developments.

Working in collaboration with the Mercers’ Company, Cogapp completed all components of the redevelopment - from user research, to information architecture, design, and technical build. We carried out comprehensive stakeholder and user research to gather requirements and our creative methodology incorporated a full design discovery process.

By marrying these findings with our user-centred design approach we were able to refresh the overall look and feel of the website. The new site is now extremely user friendly and is able to facilitate regular updates to their visitors via a new Drupal 7 Content Management System.

Our Discovery and Exploration process meant that we worked closely with The Mercers’ to develop creative and useful ways to use their content, to engage visitors to the new site. The long and illustrious history of the Company can now be explored on the site via an interactive timeline displaying 700 years of history in a user-friendly interface. Their present day activities are represented on a series of Google Maps. These include highlighting where the company has given grants, has schools and housing for the elderly and also shows the locations of sculptures of the Mercers’ maiden, which can be seen throughout the City.

The redeveloped website was the first crucial step in developing a new digital platform for the Mercers' Company, with future development phases planned in 2012.