# The Circle > A full rebuild and retheme for an award-winning community interest company in Dundee carrying four offers at once: affordable workspaces, consultancy, mobility and volunteering. A colour-coded system for the four strands and an accessible palette throughout. Canonical page: https://daveellis.dev/work/the-circle/ Made by Dave Ellis (Edinburgh, Scotland). Email: dave@daveellis.dev Last updated: 2026-11-12 Case study: a full rebuild and retheme for The Circle, an award-winning community interest company in Dundee. ## The Circle, four offers, one site. A full rebuild and retheme for an award-winning community interest company in Dundee, carrying affordable workspaces, consultancy, mobility and volunteering at the same time, for four audiences who arrive looking for completely different things. ## The brief The Circle is a community interest company in Dundee with a More Than Profit ethos, and it does four quite different things: it rents affordable workspace to small organisations, it sells consultancy, it runs a mobility service, and it takes on volunteers. Organisations like this have the hardest websites to structure, and it is a structural problem rather than a design one. Somebody looking for a desk, a consultant, a wheelchair and a volunteering placement want four unrelated things, and every one of them arrives on the same homepage. Put all four at equal weight and nobody can find theirs. Pick a favourite and three services quietly disappear. On top of that, a site like this has to be genuinely accessible. Not accessible as a compliance box, but accessible because the mobility service exists and the people using it are the ones most often failed by a decorative website. It also had to be editable. The Circle publishes constantly, and a site that needs a developer to change a date is a site that goes stale. ### At a glance - **Client**: The Circle - **Sector**: Community interest company, social enterprise - **Where**: Dundee, Scotland - **Recognition**: Award-winning, with a More Than Profit ethos - **My role**: Developer and designer: full rebuild and retheme - **The four strands**: Affordable workspaces, consultancy, mobility, volunteering - **Platform**: WordPress, rebuilt and rethemed from the ground up - **Live at**: thecirclecic.org.uk ## How four things fit on one site. ### A colour per strand Navigation you can feel Each of the four offers was given its own colour, used consistently from the navigation through to the inside pages. Once a visitor has landed in the workspaces strand, the colour tells them they are still in it, and tells them instantly when they have crossed into something else. It sounds like decoration and it is actually the information architecture. It is also the reason the homepage can give all four equal billing without the rest of the site becoming a maze. ### An accessible palette, properly Four colours that all have to work Four brand colours that each need to carry text, backgrounds and interactive states at readable contrast is a genuine design constraint rather than a preference. Several obvious choices had to be adjusted until every combination held up. Alongside that, the ordinary accessibility work: a sensible heading order, keyboard navigation that goes where you expect, alt text that describes rather than labels, and type that stays readable when somebody scales it up. ### WordPress, deliberately The team has to own it Not every site should be WordPress, and plenty on this site are not. This one should: The Circle publishes news, events and availability constantly, and the people doing that cannot be waiting on a developer. So the theme was rebuilt from the ground up rather than bought and bent. Editors get components that produce correct, accessible, on-brand pages by default, which is the only version of a content management system that stays tidy a year later. ## What was delivered - A full rebuild, not a reskin. Structure, templates, theme and content organisation all reworked. - A colour-coded system for the four strands, carried consistently through navigation, landing pages and inside pages. - An accessible palette tested across every combination the site actually uses, rather than signed off on a swatch sheet. - Workspace information given its own prominence, because that is what most visitors arrive for. - A custom WordPress theme with editing components the team can use without breaking the design. - Design and development by the same person, so nothing was lost in a handover between the two. ## Built with - WordPress - Custom theme - Information architecture - Brand and design - Accessible colour system - Responsive, mobile first - Editor components - Content migration A rebuild on an existing platform is priced like the work on the websites page, where migrations and platform moves are listed among the things that push the number up, and why. Visit thecirclecic.org.uk Another client site: Charnwood Coatings & Fabrication, a UKCA-marked structural steel fabricator established in 1985. Or see all eight projects.