Friends of the Lake District

Friends of the Lake District is an independent charity and membership organisation dedicated to protecting Cumbria's landscapes. It began at a public rally in Keswick in 1934, and its campaigning led to the creation of the Lake District National Park in 1951. It also represents the Campaign to Protect Rural England in Cumbria.

The website is where that work reaches people. It carries campaigns on issues such as fairer housing and the visitor levy, news, volunteer workparties and events, the land the charity looks after, and the routes to join, donate, volunteer or visit the shop.

I built custom Gutenberg blocks for this site in PHP and Tailwind CSS, covering both frontend and backend development, with each block pulling its content from Advanced Custom Fields.

Reusable blocks and content tools for campaigns, advocacy pages and member resources, so staff can publish without developer help.

I built almost all of this site, including the hero block at the top of the home page. It's a small block, but it shows how I work, from a Figma design through to content the client can edit.

The Figma design was tailored to Tailwind's values, so I could match it 1:1 without translating anything. Details outside the standard scale, like the angled gradient over the photo, went in as exact arbitrary values.

The block is built in PHP with its content in Advanced Custom Fields, so it's edited in the WordPress CMS rather than in code.

On phones the hero swaps to a separate portrait photo rather than cropping the landscape one, so the people stay in frame. The cost is a second image to prepare, and in return the design holds up at both sizes.

We entered content in a pre-live environment to demo the site to the client, and they were happy with it.