A warm, genuinely accessible website that gives families a direct path to support — built for a charity whose work deserved a digital presence to match.
| Client | LDN London |
|---|---|
| UN SDGs | 03 Good Health And Well-Being 08 Decent Work And Economic Growth 10 Reduced Inequalities |
| Impact | United Kingdom |
| Technologies | PHP |
LDN London (Learning Disability Network London) is a charity that has supported learning disabled adults, children, and their families across the capital since 1962. Its services range from a few hours of support a week through to round-the-clock care, alongside Community Hubs, SEND advice, and more — all built on the belief that every person with a learning disability has the right to stay healthy, be safe, and live well.
Our relationship with LDN began before the new website did. We had been supporting their existing site for some months — handling hosting, updates, and plugin maintenance — when the conversation turned to something bigger. The old site had grown into a tangle that no longer reflected the warmth or quality of LDN's work, and was getting in the way of the mission. We were invited to pitch to LDN's board of trustees for a full redesign and rebuild, and went on to deliver it.
As with our other charity and institutional work, the design, brand, and inclusive UX were led by our design partner Luminous Industries, working closely with LDN's own people — the real experts on their community. We led the build.
We built the new site as a custom WordPress theme using ACF (Advanced Custom Fields), turning Luminous's inclusive design into a flexible, accessible component library. The goal was a system the LDN marketing team could genuinely drive: publishing news, events, fundraising calls, and job listings without needing a developer, and without ever breaking the design.
Accessibility sat at the heart of the brief. For an audience of learning disabled people, their families, and carers, the site had to be inclusive by design rather than as an afterthought - and was built to meet a target of WCAG 2.2 AA, reaching AAA where feasible. That meant carrying the design's legibility, contrast, touch-target sizing, and easy-read principles all the way through into a build that held to them.
Beyond the core build, the site brings the things people actually come for to the surface: a clearer route to finding the right support, prominent and persistent donation and fundraising pathways (including the LDN Lottery), and a smoother careers area to help LDN recruit the team its services depend on. Migrating away from the old plugin-heavy site gave the charity a cleaner, faster, more dependable foundation to grow into.
Throughout the build, we worked using the Velocity Coding methodology from our sister company GroundCtrl, a future technologies lab focused on AI. By pairing AI with skilled, experienced developers - letting AI accelerate the work while seasoned engineers drive the decisions - we were able to deliver more, faster, while keeping the code clean and maintainable for the team who would inherit it.
The new LDN London website reflects the quality of the charity's work offline. Families can find support without feeling overwhelmed, people with learning disabilities see themselves in the site, and funders and commissioners can quickly understand who LDN is and why it matters. Just as importantly, the team now has a platform they can manage and grow themselves, rather than work around.
For us, it was also a project built on trust earned over time - from quietly keeping the old site running to being asked to pitch the charity's future to its trustees, and delivering a site worthy of the people it serves.