Free Wills Month
Free Wills Month raises millions for charity through gifts left in wills. We built the original site in 2013 and rebuilt it from scratch a decade later: mobile-first, on Laravel, and unbothered by the rush of visitors when a campaign opens.
Client: Ashton Maund Associates
Sector: Fundraising
Services: Design, Development, Support
Ten years, hundreds of thousands of will applications and one rebuild from scratch
Where it started
We first built the Free Wills Month website in 2013. Its job was to take applications, get the campaign noticed and support the charities taking part, and it did that well for a decade, through hundreds of thousands of applications and some very busy launch days. By 2023, though, it was showing its age. People’s habits had changed, and so had accessibility standards and what anyone expects of a website.
A fresh coat of paint wasn’t going to cover it, so we started again from scratch. This time we had ten years of data and feedback to tell us what worked.
Homework first
We began with the numbers: the analytics, the conversion funnels and the points where people gave up on their applications. Then we talked to people at the client and at the charities involved, to find out what they needed now and what had been getting in their way.
The biggest finding was that most visitors now arrived on a phone, while the old site had been designed around a desktop screen. People also wanted a smoother application, clearer wording and better help along the way. That set the agenda for everything that followed.
We needed our campaign site to do more for us. We wanted to gather much more detailed information about our visitors to help us with future planning. This meant the whole interface had to change and a complicated back-end needed to be updated and improved. Jolora worked hard to understand our needs and surpassed our expectations.
Wireframes did a lot of the early work. Together with the client we mapped out the application process, the solicitor directory, the campaign messaging and the charity content in a shared Figma project, then kept refining from there.
Designing it together
We didn’t vanish for a month and come back with finished mockups. The client was in the Figma file with us throughout, watching the design take shape, commenting as we went and taking part in each decision.
People who use Free Wills Month vary a lot in how comfortable they are online, so clarity came first. That meant obvious calls to action, large readable type, layouts that suit a phone and solid WCAG compliance. Applying is now quick and painless on whatever device is to hand.
We freshened up the look too, gently. The colours, layout and tone have all moved on a bit, but anyone who used the old site would still recognise it.
Under the bonnet
We rebuilt the platform on the TALL stack: Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js, Laravel and Livewire. Laravel looks after the application logic, the data and the connections to other services. Livewire and Alpine keep the interface quick and responsive without a heavyweight JavaScript framework, and Tailwind lets us build a completely custom design while keeping the code tidy.
The campaign is seasonal, and when it opens, everybody turns up at once. Visitor numbers can jump by more than 1,000% in a single hour. So the site runs on hosting that scales itself to meet demand, using containers and load balancing to stay fast and stay up on the busiest days.
For analytics we use Plausible, set up with a range of custom properties. The Free Wills Month team can see how people behave, roughly where they are, what devices they use and how well the site converts, and nobody has to be tracked around the internet for it.
The admin side is built with Laravel Nova. The team use it to manage campaign content, solicitor listings, scheduling and performance data themselves, without having to ask us.
Underneath all of that sit automated tests, continuous deployment and audit logging, so we can release changes with confidence and react quickly if something does go wrong.
Still looking after it
We didn’t wave goodbye at launch. We look after the platform through every campaign, which means monitoring uptime, applying security patches, tuning performance and adding features.
Every campaign also gives us new data, and we go through it with the client to decide what to improve next. That might be a tweak to the application flow, an A/B test on the interface, or a change to keep up with accessibility standards. The site gets a little better each year.
Thousands of people use it every year to get their will written, and dozens of UK charities are better funded as a result. That’s the part we’re proudest of.