A website for people in financial crisis across Somerset

The Somerset Crisis and Resilience Alliance brings together voluntary, community, faith and social enterprise organisations to support people in financial crisis across Somerset. Citizens Advice Somerset leads it. We designed and built the Alliance its own WordPress website in five weeks. We also host and look after it.

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The Somerset Crisis and Resilience Alliance website

People in financial crisis

The homepage opens with a single line, “Last month things were fine. This month they’re not.”, followed by a button straight to crisis help. Four routes follow: crisis payments and help, one to one support, about the Alliance and partner resources.

The crisis payments page sets out who can get heating oil help, housing crisis payments and crisis payments as short lists. Each list is followed by its application form and a phone number for anyone who cannot apply online.

Alliance partners

The Alliance is led by Citizens Advice Somerset. Its founding partners are Age UK Somerset, Thrive, SASP and Citizens Advice Somerset. It is funded by the Crisis and Resilience Fund through the Department for Work and Pensions and Somerset Council until the end of March 2029.

The partner resources section gives organisations across Somerset the material they need to spread the word, so people hear about the help from whichever organisation they already trust.

How we got there

The challenge

Citizens Advice Somerset asked us to build the Alliance a website of its own. It had to reach someone in crisis quickly, with plain answers about what help exists and whether they qualify.

It also had to work for the partner organisations and be ready fast. The project started at the end of September and the website launched in November 2026.

How we designed it

We designed every page around the first question a visitor in crisis has: can I get help and how do I get it. Crisis help is one click from the homepage and the eligibility criteria come before the forms.

Short lists, plain headings and a phone number beside every form keep each page easy to follow for someone under pressure, on whatever device they have.

What we built

We wrote a custom WordPress block theme from scratch, with five blocks the Citizens Advice Somerset team uses to build every page.

We host the website and look after it, keeping WordPress, its plugins and PHP up to date as the Alliance grows.

A custom block theme for the Alliance

The website runs on a custom WordPress block theme that we wrote from scratch for the Alliance. Rather than hand the team a general theme with hundreds of settings, we built the five sections the website needs as custom blocks.

The five blocks are a homepage hero, a page hero, a set of content cards, a single content card and a split section that pairs an image with text. The brand colours, type and spacing live in the theme rather than in each block.

That means the Citizens Advice Somerset team can add pages and swap content in the block editor without a page builder and without breaking the layout. Alliance partners are joining in phases, so the team can add new partners and pages from the same blocks as the Alliance grows.

The website is quick to load on a phone. Photos are served as WebP, the first image on each page loads first and anything further down the page waits until it is needed.

The homepage scores 100 for performance on desktop in Google PageSpeed Insights. Its scores on mobile:

Performance

Accessibility

Best Practices

SEO

The Alliance homepage routes on a laptop

The partner resources page on a desktop screen

The housing crisis payments page on a tablet

Accessibility by design: WCAG 2.2 AA

People looking for crisis help need to find it quickly on whatever device they have, so we built the website to meet WCAG 2.2 AA. Someone in financial crisis may be under a lot of pressure, on an old phone, using a screen reader or moving through the page with a keyboard.

A skip to content link leads past the menu, the page language is set to British English and the main and footer menus are labelled for screen readers. Every Find out more button names the page it leads to, every link that opens in a new tab says so and headings follow a logical order.

Clear headings, short lists and plain language make each page easier for everyone to follow, not only people with disabilities.

Audit results for https://somersetcrisisandresilience.org.uk/

100%

Manual and Automated Tests Passed

In compliance with United Kingdom law

Hosting, support and security

People in financial crisis rely on the website, so it has to stay fast, secure and available. We host, maintain and support it as an ongoing service, so the people who built it also look after it.

Our dev team runs the managed hosting and keeps WordPress, its plugins and PHP up to date. That closes security gaps and keeps the site working as the software around it changes.

Priority Pixels is Cyber Essentials certified, which matters to an alliance of charities and community organisations working with people in a vulnerable position.

Included	Detail
Hosting	The website runs on managed hosting looked after by our dev team.
Updates	WordPress, plugins and PHP are kept up to date.
Encryption	Every visit is encrypted over HTTPS.
Support	The Citizens Advice Somerset team raises requests directly with the people who designed and built the website. Our own dev team makes every change.

Sources: Google PageSpeed Insights, somersetcrisisandresilience.org.uk homepage, 13 November 2026. Accessibility audit results from automated axe-core scans in our own internal tool plus manual testing against WCAG 2.2 AA by one of our website accessibility developers. Project dates and website details from the build.