Building a website for one organisation is straightforward. Building one that answers to six is a different job.
The National Partnership for Ocean Prediction brings together several of the UK’s foremost marine science institutions under a single banner. Each has its own brand, its own governance, and its own view on how the work should be presented. The website had to speak for all of them at once — and be owned by none of them individually.
One site, six stakeholders
The partnership is made up of:
- Met Office
- National Oceanography Centre
- Plymouth Marine Laboratory
- Cefas
- National Centre for Earth Observation
- Scottish Government Marine Directorate
A consortium site lives or dies on neutrality. Lean too far toward any one partner’s house style and the balance is gone. So the design had to read as its own thing — a shared identity that carried the authority of six institutions without borrowing the visual language of any single one. Partner logos are given equal weight. Nothing signals a lead and a supporting cast.
Governance you can actually run
The harder problem sits behind the design. When six organisations share a platform, content sign-off is rarely a single yes. We built the site on WordPress so that editing is plain and low-risk for a distributed team — no specialist skills required to update a page, no way to break the layout by adding content. The structure keeps partner areas clear and the shared narrative coherent, so the site can grow without a redesign every time the partnership does.
Accessibility was a baseline, not an add-on. Public-facing research is read by a broad audience on every kind of device and assistive technology, and the site was built to meet that from the first page.
The point of a partnership website is that no single partner has to host it, own it, or be represented above the others. That neutrality is a design decision, not an accident.
Why this kind of work suits us
We’ve spent twenty-five years building for organisations that answer to more than one master — councils, public bodies, research consortia, learned societies. The web is the easy part. Managing competing stakeholders, procurement expectations and long content lifecycles without the site turning into a compromise no one likes: that’s the craft.
Velocity Web builds accessible, governance-ready websites for research partnerships and public-sector organisations across the South West and beyond.