Behind the scenes of
the new Forward website

Over the past 18 years we’ve been quietly opening unique workspaces across the South West, most recently with Pixel in Penzance. In the coming months we’ll open the doors to our newest space – Foundry, in Camborne – and in early 2026 Boatshed will open in Exeter.

As we’ve reached further down into the South West, we have continued to develop identities for each space, whilst ensuring they sit squarely within the larger Forward brand – no easy feat when each building is different, with a unique make-up of people, businesses and ideas. It’s what we love about our spaces, but comes with its own challenges too.

From the beginning, we never wanted to create cookie-cutter workspaces that just replicated the same look and feel time and time again, and so for a long time our online presence followed suit. We had different websites and domains for each space. Each stood alone and was branded and managed independently, retaining a distinct identity.

As we’ve grown, however, we realised that we were coming to a point where the digital footprint of our brands was becoming a little too diluted, and even a little confused. The connection between sites was getting harder and harder to see, and the Forward brand that started it all was getting lost.

So, with the help of one of our long-standing members at The Old Church School in Frome – web developers, Yellow Peach – we set about a complete redesign of the Forward website, which included a whole host of UX improvements, updates, CRM integration and brought everything together under the Forward domain.

As champions of small and creative businesses (being one ourselves, too) we thought we’d share a bit of the redesign story and how we worked with Yellow Peach to bring the new Forward website to life.

What’s in a domain?

Quite a lot, as it turns out. Domain authority, bounce rate, long-tail keywords, search intent. All these things (and so much more) has a big impact on how your website is discovered. We won’t go into the nitty gritty of the dark art of SEO optimisation, suffice to say, one thing we knew we wanted to do was leverage the strong organic search of the existing Forward website, and strengthen it with more relevant content pulled in from our other buildings.

It was a painful process, but the clear path forward was for us to move away from having separate domains, and to bring everything together under forwardspace.co.uk. It makes the site easier to navigate, helps make launching new sites easier, and enriches the experience of using the site as a whole. It makes total sense.

We looked at sites like the BBC – who are able to house a vast amount of information all under one roof – for inspiration, and started the process of mapping out what one Forward website might look like.

User experience vs. design

We kicked off the process with a discovery phase. This meant asking the right questions, understanding how people use our spaces (and our sites), and mapping out what needed to change. It was a bit of a wood for the trees situation, so we asked some of our members for feedback too. What parts of the site were hard to navigate, what information did they struggle to find and did the brand shine through?

From there, we moved into low-fidelity wireframes with quick layouts that helped us identify core components of the pages and how the general structure of the site would work under one roof. Then we moved to high-fidelity prototypes, including detailed, interactive mockups that we could move around in, see on different devices and share with our wider team too.

The result of this iterative design process is a much more coherent site, where the individual brands still shine through, but users can easily compare membership options between different spaces and see events and blog posts across all sites in a much more fluid way, all with stronger SEO and a sense of place thrown in too.

Connecting the dots with Coherent

Another key part of the redesign was the integration of Coherent – our bespoke membership management tool. Coherent is where all of our customer data lives, where we manage memberships, bookings and agreements and where our customer journey continues once someone has signed up.

It also has a CRM system that we’d wanted to integrate with our front-end website, and so one of the key pillars of the new website was to build forms and integrations that would speak directly to Coherent through an API connection. Rather than having information existing in two places, or utilising third-party apps, this new integration allows us to automatically pull new customer leads straight into Coherent so we can respond to enquiries faster and make the sign-up process easier for our customers too.

What’s next?

With the new site now built and live, we have created a blueprint that we can build on and continue to use for many years. We can easily add new buildings, change content and further build on the usability and functionality of the sites to make them even easier to use.

We have plans to continually develop the new site, with the guidance of Yellow Peach, so watch this space for our future plans. We’re a workspace provider at heart, but we’re entrepreneurs too, so who knows where we might end up.