Inspiration can come from unexpected sources.

Take this article for example. It’s about websites but it was inspired by camping mattress repairs. The LLM in my head had some strange training materials. Bear with me though, it will all make sense. 

The mattress repair conundrum

If you’ve been camping this summer, there’s a reasonable chance that you’ve woken up with a painful achy sensation due to a deflated mattress, better known as “Overnight matt deflation syndrome” or OMDS. You’re not alone. Punctured mattresses present a huge issue for companies like Decathlon as well as their users. They offer repair services and fixing leaky air mattresses is apparently one of their most popular requests. The fix is simple – find the hole and apply a patch. Finding the hole can be tricky and time consuming though. The time factor is the issue here because it makes repairing the mattress uneconomical. 

So given the scale of issue, they broke down the problem to its definitive part – identifying where the leak was. They approached the challenge laterally and thought about what other industries might have experienced this sort of problem and had already solved it. This led them to an unlikely place. The fossil gas industry. 

Gas leaks are a huge problem for the fossil fuel industry. They can be costly and hard to find, just like they are for, err, camping mattresses. So they developed a solution. Using a special camera and microphone, they check pipelines for leaks. The microphone identifies the sound of leaks (pfft) and pinpoints it on the camera screen. Engineers can then tag the pipeline and make a repair. 

Decathlon found that this technology can be used for their repairs too. It slashed the time required to patch a leak to a handful of minutes and made the repair offering viable again. When it’s fully rolled out it has the potential to massively reduce waste and increase customer satisfaction. 

Camping mattresses are like websites

The genius of this idea from Decathlon is not the use of technology to solve a problem, it’s in identifying the core of the problem you’re trying to solve. If you focus too hard on the overall problem you can end up missing potential solutions from other, unexpected places. If you remove the product, client, sector or industry from the equation and just try to solve the core user/customer problem, inspiration can come from anywhere. 

This is something Wholegrain practices across our projects and clients. Our user centric, Humane Web approach helps us focus on the need, not the problem at hand. We’re sector agnostic, which is a fancy way of saying that if a solution from one sector can work for another, we’ll use it. A simple example might be using e-commerce inspired product filters to make it easier to find articles on a large media site. 

What do heart surgeons and transport planners have in common?

We’re not just looking for features though, it’s about the shared needs of projects too. Two of our most recent site builds, EACTs and UITP are great examples. On the face of it, a site for Cardiothoracic surgeons should have little in common with one for Public Transport professionals. But when you look at the needs of the two sets of users, you find much more common ground.

Both sites are for Membership organisations, so they need to provide relevant information about things like events, industry news and best practices. We can take tried and tested ways of sharing news for heart surgeons and apply them for transport planners. The lessons from a transport summit site can improve the user experience for medical professional conference sites. 

Different missions, shared goals 

This user centric approach helps us share solutions and experience for clients who have similar goals but are at different stages in their journeys too. Environment Bank and Good Energy are two of our clients with sustainability at the core of their operations. They’re both on a mission to make the UK greener, cleaner and more bio diverse but work in very different sectors. Despite this, some of their core user problems are very similar and solutions can be shared between the sites. 

Part of their challenge is helping UK businesses to transition to working in ways that decarbonise and restore natural habitats, to improve the local and national environment. Environment Bank does this by helping developers meet their legal bio-diversity commitments through consultation and habitat banks. Good Energy is helping decarbonise the energy sector through renewable energy provision and support for lower carbon technologies like EVs and heat pumps. 

A big challenge for both companies comes down to education, information and persuasion. The design techniques, user experiences and features that Good Energy have been using can help to inform what users need for an organisation like Environment Bank, just like with EACTs and UITP. Users are looking for solutions to environmental problems and want clear, easy to digest information to help them make positive changes. 

For an organisation like Environment Bank their offering is less well known than the renewables that Good Energy offers. But Good Energy has also been in the position of offering different ways of doing things that required reassurance and confidence to persuade users. We can apply the lessons from more mature organisations to organisations who are earlier in their development. No matter what stage they are at, these users for these organisations’ sites have similar needs. Focussing on the needs means more solutions.

Focussing on users is our super strength 

When you look at our portfolio of sites and clients, you’ll see a diverse set of organisations, sectors and industries. The thing they share is that they want to work with a sustainably minded agency to further their positive goals. This diversity means that we’ve got a huge breadth of experience meeting a wide range of user requirements. Our sites are robust, humane, digitally sustainable, performant, but most importantly user-centric. After all it’s their problems we need a site to solve, no matter what they are. 

If you’ve got a web project you’d like to discuss, reach out to Bailey to find out how this approach could work for you. 

You’ll find more insights into our working practices in this range of articles on our Humane Web approach.

This series has been giving a behind the scenes look at the Wholegrain team and how we operate. In our final article I’m talking to one of our Project Managers (PMs), Havana about our approach to client and working relationships. 

We start our conversation with Havana raving about a Demon Copperhead, a recent hit at her book club, “I absolutely loved it“. Her current read, The Sleepwalkers is less highbrow but more fun. I ask her if she’s spreadsheet tracking ratings and comments about the books they read in the club. There is one and she’s in charge of it. Project managers gonna project manage. 

As you might glean from this, Havana is a PM through and through. As her LinkedIn profile says, she’s adept at “Leading Cross-Functional Teams from Discovery to Launch”. She’s been working facilitating projects since she graduated. Initially she worked in the charitable housing sector and latterly for creative agencies. Havana talks fondly about her colleagues she’s worked with. It’s often the people she works with that give her the most inspiration. Theory, technique and frameworks are important but people, experience and collaboration trump that.

The people at Wholegrain are one of the things Havana talks most passionately about during our conversation. It’s the most tight knit and aligned company she’s ever worked for. We agree that Wholegrain’s innovative “blind” recruitment process must be working. 

The cohesion and connection in the team makes Havana’s life easier. She’s happy to leave the glamorous work (design and coding) to others in the team. Her role is managing the creative element more than contributing to it. To facilitate this she works to foster a collaborative and transparent working environment for client and agency alike.

Maintaining client relationships 

This internal alignment helps projects run smoothly but that’s not the only factor at play here. I ask Havana how her experience helps things run smoothly on the client side. She tells me that her experience at a not-for-profit housing association was a great foundation. Working there meant she saw first hand the structural issues and internal stresses the charity sector has to navigate. There are complexities and expectations that differ from corporate organisations. 

Most relevant to her role with Wholegrain is the experience of working in organisations with small teams and little excess capacity. People are often wearing multiple hats, with a diverse set of responsibilities. As charities and not-for-profits tend to run lean personnel wise, they sometimes need more time to consider ideas and digest discussions. 

Wholegrain’s clients are all purpose driven and meet our ethical screening criteria, but come from diverse sectors with different financing and structures.

Does working with a spectrum of organisations present a challenge to Havana and her PM colleagues? 

According to Havana the key to meeting this challenge is in building close relationships with all the clients you work with. It can require a lot of code switching during the week. You might go from a meeting with a smaller not-for-profit, straight into a call with a larger corporate client. Time pressures for these organisations can be different. A corporate with a higher budget might move more quickly, while at a charity the time pressure is internal. Smaller organisations might need more breathing space to carve out time to allow them to make the best decision.

Regardless of the type of client, a close relationship is nothing if you’re not delivering what you promise. Havana has to be pragmatic when considering timelines and deliverables. It’s not always possible to deliver the right solution straight away. This doesn’t mean you can’t meet a client deadline. But it does mean carefully managing client requirements with internal capacity. It’s a balancing act but one that Havana and Wholegrain are very adept at. 

Client and agency in harmony

I ask Havana what this looks like when it works best? She cites one of her larger clients, The International Association of Public Transport (UITP). She’s been working with them for the past two years, initially on a site build and then maintaining ongoing improvements and additional projects. Havana has facilitated a relationship between her contacts at UITP and the Wholegrain team that is both harmonious and effective.

It allows the agency and client to work collaboratively to continuously improve multiple sites.  This ensures that the user experience meets their audience needs in a performant, accessible and low carbon way. 

Humane Web and Project Management

This example of accessibility and sustainability brings us nicely to Havana’s role in building Humane Web sites. She comes back to the idea of the account and project management teams working as facilitators. Humane Web standards are generally researched, maintained and improved up by the UX, design and development teams. The proof is in the popularity, engagement and performance metrics that our sites attain . The alignment and trust she has with the agency as a whole means she can take the ideas and justification into her daily work. 

I ask if our approach can sometimes cause tension with clients? Our way of working is different from other agencies, being more holistic and sustainability focussed. In Havana’s experience tensions can arise but they tend to be short lived. Transparency and open communication smoothes the way.  

For new site builds, clients tend to be more open to low carbon solutions. After all, they’re clear on our vision, mission and process because of Bailey, Chris and anyone else in the proposal process More often the challenges arise with retainer clients where we are maintaining and improving an existing site. The vast majority of the time all that is required is an open conversation, backed by our experience, metrics and proof of concept, to persuade people that a Humane Web is right for them and their users. 

This user focus is a key part of our Humane Web Principles and what makes it popular with clients. As Tommy discussed in our last article, rather than looking for a specific functionality, Havana and the team will try to understand what the specific user need is for the site. With that defined we can now propose optimised, accessible, light weight solutions that meet user needs and improve site performance. 

In Havana’s experience, once clients see the benefits first hand, they are sold. Alignment is locked in and a more Humane Web approach becomes second nature. She knows it’s working when clients ask for advice rather than a specific solution. They want to collaborate to find the best choice for users. 

Falling down the Humane Web and Digital Sustainability rabbit hole

Learning about digital sustainability has been an eye opening experience for Havana. It wasn’t something at the core of her work in the past so there has been a lot to take in. Performance and optimisation have always been something to strive for in digital projects but adding the sustainability element takes it to the next level. Like most of the team, she finds it almost impossible not to run sites she finds through Website Carbon. She says she finds herself boring, sorry, educating friends and family when the topic of websites comes up. I know the feeling. 

I follow up questions about digital sustainability with the inescapable topic of AI. I view the subject through a sustainability and ethical lens but appreciate that this is different from how most approach the technology.

Like many in the agency, her approach has been considered. Where she’s found it works for her is by using tools like Granola to help with taking notes at meetings. In particular, a summarised transcript of technical discussions can be really helpful to aid research and understanding from her non-technical background. But she’s found the tools lacking where a human touch is required. Drafting documents or emails often feels like it lacks nuance. She wants her communication to be human and genuine and hasn’t found that GenAI can recreate this. 

Buying into purposeful business practices

As we wrap up, I wonder if working for a BCorp like Wholegrain has changed the way her perceptions about how businesses could operate. As with our digital sustainability approach, the agency’s working practices have been eye opening too. She’s found that her sustainable and ethical behaviours have been amplified by her time at Wholegrain. Internal policies like our vegetarian food policy have a knock on impact on your whole diet in a positive way. Working with engaged, purpose driven clients brings new perspectives and insights. She tells me she’s found herself engaging with ethical brands as a first port of call without realising the change. Looking for a BCorp aligned approach becomes second nature. 

I ask what aspects of Wholegrain’s approach she’d like to see more widely adopted. For her, it’s how digital accessibility is considered from the very start. Once you see what should happen it’s hard not to notice sites that don’t take this approach. Once you understand you start to see inaccessible colour schemes wherever they arise. 

December will mark three years of working at Wholegrain. To finish our conversation, I ask what Havana is most proud of in her time here. Her first instinct is to mention how she has built strong client relationships. Wholegrain encourages solid, open relationships with clients. For her it makes work more human and fun but also more effective. Better working relationships make for better, more user friendly sites. She then reflects on what she has brought to the team. Early on she saw opportunities to improve the process and structures for our Continuous Improvement clients. Her ideas, including each client having a workbook that provides a single source of truth for client and agency alike, has strengthened our working practices. 

If you’re working with Havana, you’re in extremely good hands. 

If you’d like this type of relationship during a site build or retainer relationship, get in touch with our Growth Manager, Bailey to discuss how Wholegrain could help you and your organisation.

You can find more articles on our working practices and the people that bring them to life here.

Over recent months I’ve been speaking to various members of the team about how Wholegrain builds Humane Web experiences for our clients. Our MD Chris discussed how the agency is pushing the boundaries for ethical and sustainable web design. Bailey shone light on how we enable sustainable digital transformation. Tod showed how we put users first through our Discovery process. Chânelle talked about the joyful challenge of designing Humane websites.

This next conversation is with one of our senior developers. Tommy is our Technical Delivery Lead overseeing our coding standards, tech stack and much more.

This ended up being a more open ended conversation than some of the others in the series. At times it felt like a meditation on web development and coding, a calm and insightful conversation all at once.

Balance and board games

Our call started with me jealously coveting some Tintin wall art in the background of his office. It becomes clear that the simple artistic style of Herge’s comics offer an insight into who Tommy is. The analog nature of the books reflects his habit of getting away from the screen and technology as much as possible outside of work. Within the agency Tommy is renowned as a lover of board games. This sense of fun and competition translates well into inclusive and occasionally daft games to play on staff nights out. 

Tommy’s deep foundations with WordPress started 12 years ago in a tiny office in Worcester. At the time he was working with it as a user rather than a developer. Over time he started looking for coding solutions to solve challenges. The shift to WordPress developer began in earnest. In the intervening years a mixture of training, WordPress community participation, hands on experience and conference appearances have honed Tommy’s technical and problem solving skills to become a vital part of our developer team.

Today his experience and technical expertise make him the perfect fit for his role as Technical Delivery Lead. Internally he oversees the core codebase of our proprietary theme, owns the team tools and services and creates the process documentation that helps our team work smoothly. 

On the client work side he works closely with our Head of Experience, Tod on finding the right technical solutions for large, complex projects. His experience means he can be called upon for tricky tech support questions from clients and the dev team. 

Craftsmanship in coding

When Tommy talks about his work, the theme of craftsmanship comes up over and over again. He has a passion for making our sites as efficient, effective and robust as possible. While others in the team focus more on design and features, Tommy is busy ensuring our code base is crafted with care, attention and longevity in mind. 

Does this feel restrictive I wonder? 

A little perhaps, but Tommy views any constraints as a good thing, a structure to work within. He sees issues arising from adopting the latest CSS features. Wholegrain is in the business of building sites that have few barriers to entry. This includes technical barriers, where older devices or browsers can’t support the latest features reliably.Using a tool like Can I use to check how widely supported a new HTML or CSS feature is allows us to strike the right balance. Broadly speaking these features should be almost universally supported, but there is always room to manoeuvre given likely audiences and site intentions.

This brings us to another of the key themes I take from the conversation, balance. His “analogue” pastimes balance his technical, digital work. At work he pushes the agency to find balance in our output. This search has users at its main focus and means balancing usability, accessibility, sustainability and creativity. 

Does this impact how creative Wholegrain can be?

Not especially, particularly in light of Wholegrain’s sustainable and user focussed approach. In Tommy’s view, questions about how creative to be should always take into account a user’s needs. We should always be asking “what are you trying to solve”. Meeting user requirements is rarely a question of using the latest tech.

Respect your users and they will reward you

The best Wholegrain sites showcase our creativity without sacrificing usability and respect a user’s attention.  I ask if he has a favourite project where these elements come together. Operation Smile comes readily to mind. Wholegrain worked to improve their donation journey, which in Tommy’s words, was very nerdy work. 

The combination of complex coding and integrations, lots of important and open conversations and a worthy cause represents the best of what Wholegrain does. The end results were impactful too, resulting in a 141% increase in conversions, a reduced exit rate and most importantly a 161% increase in online donations. 

Sustainable Digital Transformation

Craft, efficiency and attention to detail is something that Tommy brings to our digital sustainability consulting projects. He loves helping to bring Wholegrain’s pedigree and experience to other organisations. 

Ever since Tom pioneered sustainable web development we’ve been building an institutional understanding of the issue. What seems obvious to our team is anything but obvious to other organisations. There is a joy in sharing our knowledge and watching understanding grow and behaviours change. Not only that but it’s a way of exploring issues away from our day to day or regular client base. 

It’s a learning experience for everyone involved and each project evolves our understanding. 

I’ve been asking other members of the team what aspect of Wholegrain’s working methods other agencies should adopt. His experiences of delving into some horribly tangled code bases informs his response. Developers should respect the craft of coding when it comes to creating websites. Choose quality over the cutting edge (or vibe coding).

This belief reflects his thoughts on AI coding too. Generative code, produced without a sense of craft or background in coding, is unlikely to meet Tommy’s strict standards when it comes to efficiency, simplicity or accessibility. Coupled to this, you’ve got to know who you are building a site for. 

There can be a massive difference between a site that will make your C-suite happy and a site that meets your user’s needs. AI’s tendency to support and reinforce your prompt rather than push back could exacerbate this problem. 

As you can see Tommy is the perfect person to set the standards for our sites. If you’d like a site crafted specifically for your users, people and planet, get in touch with Bailey to discuss a project.

You can find more articles on our working practices and the people that bring them to life here.

I’ve been really excited to talk to Wholegrain’s Growth Manager, Bailey as part of our series introducing you to key members of our team. She is a true digital sustainability disciple and brings an energy and eclectic set of influences and ideas to all she does. Her role at the agency includes vetting potential new clients, pitching for projects, managing client projects and relationships as well as working to knit together our Sustainable Digital Transformation offering. 

I start our conversation asking about her inspirations. Typically she mentions a wide range of influences. Gardening features heavily in our initial discussions but otherwise a couple of newsletters stand out to me as illustrative. Creative Destruction and Dense Discovery are beautifully curated emails that aim to find connections and sense in an increasingly “noisy” world. They are inherently curious, pragmatic and realistic but also look to find joy and optimism where it can be found. All of these adjectives are descriptions I’d apply to Bailey too. 

Collaboration and BCorp alliances FTW

Connection and collaboration are key themes for Bailey. She is a keen advocate of the BCorp Agency Alliance. Her enthusiasm about the alignment she finds in this group, as well as a push towards collaborating for the greater good is infectious. While in other circumstances you might find agencies jostling for position, here there is a view that the collective is stronger when ethically driven agencies collaborate together. 

When I talk about her role at Wholegrain (WG), I put it to her that she could be seen as a bit of a protector of WG. Ethical screening and client and project alignment is of vital importance to how WG operates. Given that part of her role is to run prospective projects through the ethical screen policy does she see herself as a gatekeeper? 

She doesn’t quite agree with the characterization. It’s about calling aligned clients in, not blocking them out. Ethical screening is part of the picture but in reality it’s about spotting mutually beneficial relationships. You have to ask “can Wholegrain’s approach benefit a prospective client”? Will there be the right amount of synergy between client and agency to make things a roaring success? 

She points out that energy and effort in the team is not infinite. We have a holistic approach that benefits both clients and the Wholegrain team and we can’t do our best work if we’re overstretched. So Bailey sees part of her work as ensuring that those efforts are focussed on the right clients and the right projects. 

Sustainable Digital Transformation

Some of the most exciting projects Bailey has won for the agency recently are for our Sustainable Digital Transformation offering. Bailey tends to bring a positive energy to calls and meetings but when I start to discuss the transformation projects in the pipeline, this energy kicks up a notch (or three). 

Digital sustainability (DS) is what brought Bailey to Wholegrain. She describes when she first learned about the topic as being like a smack in the face. Our daily lives are digital and when you learn about the amount of energy and infrastructure that enables this you can’t help but be shocked. The scale can be mind blowing.

She cites emails as a powerful illustration.

• In 2025 approximately 376 billion emails were sent and received daily. That’s one hundred thirty-seven trillion two hundred forty billion (137,240,000,000,000) annually. 
• EcoSend estimates that this equates to an annual carbon footprint of 300 million tons CO₂ from emails worldwide.

There is a finite amount of energy that we can expend as a species and remain within safe planetary boundaries. But when your contribution to the problem remains almost infinitesimally small compared to the whole, what can you do? It can be hard to find a starting point to make improvements. As with so many sustainability issues it’s a case of starting small. Like many, Bailey discovered the Website Carbon tool at the start of her journey and it inspired her to greater action. 

The open sharing of knowledge that Website Carbon represents was an inspiration to Bailey. This transparency forms the cornerstone of her approach to DS and Sustainable Digital Transformation. But transparency and knowledge are nothing without positive action. “Like much of sustainability, DS is not a checkbox exercise. It’s a journey to better governance and behaviours”. 

Moving beyond carbon emissions

In many ways Bailey’s journey mirrors Wholegrain’s. Website Carbon represents a starting point, a way of benchmarking, with energy use and CO2e estimates as a metric. But at the core of Sustainable Digital Transformation is the concept of the Humane Web which moves things beyond carbon emissions.  

“CO2 has been the metric for so long but it’s a starting point.” It doesn’t take into account things like climate justice. “Climate change is unequally damaging”. While we in the global north benefit from access to digital services, the harm this causes is often visited on the global south. Issues like E-waste processing, low paid data tagging, arduous and dehumanising content moderation, resource extraction and climate change are all issues felt more keenly in developing nations. At the same time those nations can suffer from low data zones meaning a lack of access and lack of digital benefits. 

Our transformation services aim to take a more global view. Low cost digital platforms and storage have often created messy digital estates. As Bailey puts it “expansion without architecture is chaos”. As with the newsletters Bailey loves, you need to take a holistic view and look for connections, positivity, optimisation and solutions. This leads to asking questions like:

• How do your digital platforms fit together? 
• How do you improve usability for all? 
• How do you bake sustainability and accessibility into your projects from the start? 
• How do you facilitate digital decisions being made quickly, both internally and externally? 

Paradoxes and misconceptions 

From the outside it might seem paradoxical that the creators or Website Carbon are moving away from CO2e as the key element for digital sustainability. Bailey argues that it shows the field is maturing. After years of measuring, benchmarking and considering the sources of digital emissions, she sees Wholegrain as having the experience and mindset required to move the conversation and field forwards. 

I ask if Bailey sees any misconceptions around Wholegrain and the work we do. If there are any, they’re around how the web design process should happen. Too many agencies offer ungrounded designs that over-promise on their capabilities but end up under delivering.

The misconception is that it’s possible to create a fit purpose design without carrying out an effective exploratory discovery process. The findings from the process feed into our iterative design process. All of this allows us to deliver strong designs that not only look great but also work for you and your audience in the short, medium and long term.

Alignment is key here too. When Bailey lands work for clients who are completely aligned in purpose, mission and direction, the results are outstanding.

I ask what this alignment looks like in practice and Bailey cites one of the first projects she brought on board at Wholegrain, Environment Bank. From the very start of the process, there was total alignment, trust and collaboration. With both sides trusting the process and some award winning branding to work with, the result is a site that matches their aims. It’s handsome, robust and supports the work they do. 

Bailey points out that this idea of robustness highlights another misconception around Wholegrain and our process. We won’t only build a site that looks good but also one that is long lived, secure and maintainable. We sometimes inherit sites that look good on the front end but are messy to update and manage at the back end. Cutting corners and moving too quickly at the outset of a project can add technical debt and hugely increase the lifetime cost of a website, or necessitate a full rebuild. 

Why, why, why?

I remind Bailey that she is nearly two years into her time here and ask her what she’s learnt since joining the agency. “Asking why is more important than how or when”. To Bailey’s mind many of the issues we’ve discussed come up because not enough people ask about “the why”. If you don’t know “the why”, you can’t accurately answer how something needs to happen or when it could be finished. 

I can’t leave the conversation without asking about AI, a topic I know she has strong thoughts on. “Tech should enable our lives and not be a destination where we spend our lives”. Much of the AI discourse seems to be about integrating technology into every element of our lives. It’s not clear if the benefits outweigh the costs, be they financial, environmental or societal. If AI lives up to the hype, then maybe the benefits will outweigh the costs after all. 

She appreciates Wholegrain’s considered approach to the technology, pragmatically using solutions where appropriate. Integrating Holp onto the UKGBC site is one such example. Much of Wholegrain’s work is about making things as efficient as possible, so users can find answers and spend their time elsewhere afterwards, while minimising the impact at the same time. Weighing up the pros and cons of a service like Holp allows us to do that.

Ultimately, the evolution of DS and Wholegrain means that our digital experiences are meeting human needs. Our services and working practices can offer inspiration to others. We continue to show that you can put your users first while respecting and protecting the planet and humanity as a whole.

If you’ve been considering making your site more tailored to your community and mission, Bailey is all ears!

You can find more articles on our working practices and the people that bring them to life here.

So far in this series I’ve spoken to Tod about our Discovery process and Chânelle about Designing for a Humane Web. Both these pieces give an insight into the processes the agency follows. But in this piece we’ll look at the bigger picture and talk to our MD Chris about how he is guiding Wholegrain. It’s nearly 3 years since Chris took over the day to day running of Wholegrain from founders Tom and Vineeta. It’s been a time of internal change but the direction has remained steadfast – building websites (and by extension a web) that are better for people and planet.

This article will give a better idea of what inspires and influences Chris, his thoughts on the sustainability space and his vision for the future of Wholegrain

Inspiration

I kick off our chat by asking what influences Chris both personally and professionally. I already know he’s one of the B Community’s foremost experts on vegan hot spots so I steer clear of this topic as it might derail my research. Chris describes himself as a serial hobbyist. “If it’s creative and something you can learn, I’m pretty much going to say yes – from pottery to sewing to painting, I’m happy using my hands to make something.” Having previously seen Chris’s incredible hand made backpack this definitely rings true. 

More surprising is a keen interest in Architecture. Chris is careful to stress that he’s got no idea of the names of buildings or even architects involved. For him it’s “about the impact space, light or form can have on you as a person”. When faced with a difficult project or decision he’ll often take these thoughts to different buildings or spaces. The simple act of changing your surroundings can be a great way of unsticking an issue. “It’s so interesting how something like a building, that is fundamentally about shelter and survival, can also provide creativity and emotion.” 

I’m keen to find out a little about his professional inspirations too. He comes alive when describing the creative services offered by Nice and Serious. “To me, they were a driving force behind what I think of when it comes to creativity for good.”. He’s reverent about the lack of ego and self promotion in their work and I hear echoes of what Wholegrain does best when he talks about “quality, creative work that is for the people who need it”. 

Dispelling the myth that BCorps only celebrate other BCorps, he also mentions the work Reuben Turner is doing at Rewild. He’s taken with the “gorgeous simplicity to how he approaches creativity” and the humanity of his work. Nowhere is this humanity more apparent than on his Five Things page. The distillation of Rewild’s philosophy into five simple pillars is something I see in Chris’s approach too, as well as the treatise that “Allies always win”. 

As a leader of a celebrated agency I’m interested in other organisations that Chris looks to for leadership and operational ideas. He highlights humanity as being incredibly important to him and it’s a theme that we will revisit over and over again in our conversation. Chris looks for organisations outside of the agency and BCorp bubbles to find people that live and breathe their values on a micro and macro level.

He highlights Hearth as an example. The Wholegrain team recently visited this social enterprise community bakery in Hackney. They “operate in such a circular way that when you see it, you can’t help but be inspired. The impact that individual people can have on the fundamental needs of others and the planet is really inspiring. I want that to be something I distill into Wholegrain.”

Wholegrain and the Humane Web

Humanity has always been important within Wholegrain and how we operate on a day to day basis. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the pioneering work done on Sustainable Web Design. It’s an oft repeated line but our founder Tom, literally wrote the book on the subject. Under Chris’s leadership, Wholegrain has been evolving. Sustainability is still a key but our operations and philosophy are becoming more holistic. Enter the concept of the Humane Web. 

As Chris puts it:

“For a long time Wholegrain has been at the forefront of digital sustainability but we also know that alone is not enough. The reality is that the internet needs far more nuance than just making it sustainable from a technical point of view – it should work for every person that needs it, wherever they are and however they access it. A Humane Web is the defined vision of that thought and it perfectly sums up how Wholegrain has evolved its ways of working over the past couple of years.”

The Humane Web concept is changing Wholegrain on a technical, operational and foundational level.

“Its changed the shape of our business and led to creating roles within our team that focus on experience design and technical delivery alongside the more traditional agency roles to design and build websites. It goes past the idea of ‘user centric’ and instead builds websites that enable users to define what that even means for them individually as they engage with your site – as an example, it leads us to consider users who want exploration and fact gathering in order to convert with equal weight to those who want quick conversion. 

Self paced, accessible both in terms of design and data and high performance built in, are key to everything we do.”

Low weight, highly performant, robustly coded and accessible Wordpress sites remain at the core of everything we do as an agency. We’ll be committed to building low carbon websites as long as we operate. But this evolving approach has allowed us to look beyond websites to be able to offer something more transformative. 

“We have crafted and defined a new service offering that stitches the work we do together across accessibility, sustainability and data inequality for organisations to go past just their website and consider the impact of their entire digital estate. Sustainable Digital Transformation is the best way to evolve and future proof everything digital in your organisation. 

It’s a really exciting evolution of what Wholegrain can do to further the mission of a Humane Web.”

I suggest that this approach might be seen to be at odds with the actions of the big tech firms that shape the way we browse and live online in today’s society. Invasive data gathering and massive data centre growth pushes on regardless of the societal and environmental costs they reap. 

How does he navigate that tension?

“The tension is definitely there but so is the simple fact that a more humane website is a better performing website in all areas. I hold that front and centre whenever we hit that tension because I don’t think there is any brief or hurdle that I’ve seen that can’t be solved with it. If you want to increase performance, a sustainable site does that. If you want increased conversion rates, robust experience design will deliver that. 



We can’t change big tech but we can show organisations and individuals that there is another, greener, fairer, more effective way.”

Inevitably Generative AI sneaks into the conversation at this point. I ask what one word springs to mind when Chris thinks of AI. After a moment’s thought, he settles on “regressive”. It’s not the technology itself that feels regressive rather the models the platforms are based on. 

“Any model, in any area of life, that is based on mass data input and then making decisions based on averages – feels regressive.” This belief has played a part in Wholegrain taking a cautious approach to AI adoption. As with any digital agency, it’s a constant presence in client and technical discussions. For the time being Chris doesn’t see this approach changing. 

Never say never though. 

“As we get further clarity on the benefits and negatives, there is definitely room for a more sympathetic and considered way of using AI and Wholegrain will follow that path.”

The bigger picture

Anyone who works in, or adjacent to the sustainability and purpose driven “sectors” will recognise that the past few years have been tough. The push back against environmental protections and equality by the Trump regime has sent unwanted ripples across the world. Charities and sustainability focussed organisations have suffered. Chris and others in Wholegrain’s leadership have worked tirelessly to protect the agency and team against this backdrop. 

More positively it looks like there are green shoots of recovery starting to become visible. The successes of Zohran Mamdani in New York and Hannah Spencer for the Green Party in Gorton and Denton have provided succour. Their successful campaigns have also marked a shift in sustainability messaging. Equality and quality of life are the core messages with sustainability an important but less explicit policy point. It’s something Chris and I have discussed a lot recently. 

I ask what organisations like Wholegrain could learn from this shift in approach and messaging. 

“Whilst Wholegrain has always led in digital sustainability, there is a legacy and baggage that comes with the word ‘sustainability’. That realisation runs parallel to a second, which is that in the world as it exists in 2026, what’s important is humanity. We see that with the evolution of the Green Parties core messaging and we will start to see that with Wholegrain evolution over the year ahead as we start to position ourselves more authentically to the agency we are now.” 

As I start to wrap up the conversation I ask what aspect of Wholegrains’ ethos he’d like to see other organisations and competitors adopt. Again, humanity is a key influence. 

“Short wins don’t benefit like long term impact does. I struggle to see why that wouldn’t be something that doesn’t steer your approach when it so clearly benefits the quality of your output, the impact of digital on the environment, the experience of the user and the clients ability to meet their goals.”

Additionally there is sometimes a lack of true authenticity in the “business for good” sector. Conversations with prospective clients in the sustainability space can be frustrating. “The amount of purpose or impact driven organisations that don’t live the same values in their digital space when the benefits are so undeniable on all levels.”.

As we often say in our presentations, digital is physical. You can’t separate your online and offline actions and decisions and policies when it comes to equality and sustainability. There is an idea that story telling and impact on a website comes from autoplay videos and heavyweight javascript powered features. Performance and environmental impact be damned. 

For my final question I keep things nice and easy.

What’s the thing that Chris is most proud of in his first 3 years at Wholegrain?

After mildly berating me for the question he considers and settles on “resilience”. As I mentioned earlier the past few years (most of Chris’s time in charge in fact) haven’t been made any easier by external factors. 

“Wholegrain has a legacy that was definitely heavy to carry when I first started and as a sector, agencies have not had an easy few years, but we are still here, still innovating and still moving the needle on what a purpose led business in our space can do. I’m proud of that.”  

For me, the most important thing innovative and ethical businesses and organisations can do is continue doing what they are doing. They have to keep carrying the torch and inspiring others to do better. With Chris at the helm, the Humane Web as a guiding light and resilience as a core tenet, Wholegrain looks well set to do just that. 


You can find more articles on our working practices and the people that bring them to life here.

*Author’s note. In early drafts of this article I used phrases like “flesh out” or “adding meat to the bones” which are wildly inappropriate for our proudly plant powered MD. I briefly thought about using “adding pulses to the salad” but it didn’t quite land. If you’ve got plant based metaphors to use in place of carnivorous ones, drop me an email…

In our last article we discovered the Wholegrain Discovery process. Tod explained how the process helps align our projects and identify Experience Principles. But when the Discovery phase is over and we’ve identified these principles, what’s next? 

This is when our UI/UX designer Chânelle gets involved and her design magic brings things to life. When I think about her a few things spring readily to mind.  

• The holder of the unofficial title for “most desirable interior design in the background of video calls” at Wholegrain
• A “Ghost Sign” enthusiast
• A fount of NeilsonNorman knowledge
• A taker of (too?) many photos while travelling

But most importantly for this article she’s Wholegrains’ design lead. Since 2020 Chânelle has been helping craft sites with users and the planet in mind.

I chatted with Chânelle about her influences, process and where she takes design inspiration from. 

If you’re lucky enough to be a Wholegrain client you’ll have seen her sorcery in action. If you’re not yet a Wholegrain client, read on to find out why you should be… 

About Chânelle

I kicked things off by asking how she would describe the sites she designs for Wholegrain’s. After a moment’s pause she settles on “clean and considered”. It’s a great summation of our diverse portfolio. Clean design with users considered above all else. Chânelle is on a mission to help create sites that endure and work for all users. 

She explains that there are layouts, patterns and conventions that just work for websites. They allow users to find information quickly. If you can use these conventions it allows you to be creative elsewhere, without sacrificing usability.

Design Inspiration

If the devil is in the detail, where does she find inspiration for those details? As you’d expect from an experienced designer, her inspiration comes from far and wide. Magazines, blogs, her travels, mid-century design and of course websites of all shapes and sizes. 

Regular visits to places like Awwwards means Chânelle is on top of the latest trends in web design. I find this interesting because like most of the team at Wholegrain, if I see a site I like on Awwwards, the first thing I do is check out its carbon score on Website Carbon. More often than not, they are cutting edge but have poor performance scores.

As it turns out Chânelle does the same! What she looks for are features that might work for our clients. From there she works with our developers to see if it’s possible to reverse engineer them with lower weight code. Cutting edge features with lower carbon scores. 

Away from the flashy stuff, places like SiteInspire, LowwwwCarbon and intriguingly, Brutalist Websites feature in her bookmarks on her browser. When she tells me this I have to pause our chat to check out the Brutalist site as Chânelle watches on. She’s smiling as I scroll because hardly any of the site designs are appropriate for any of our client’s sites!

She explains that she likes that the nature of these sites lets the content do the talking and often in a low weight way. Even if the aesthetic isn’t appropriate, the design language can be and looking at these sites provides useful touchstones for her designs.

Designing for a Humane Web in practice

As you’d expect for Wholegrain, Chanelle’s designs have accessibility, usability and sustainability built in from the very beginning. So knowing a bit more about where her inspiration comes from, I’m keen to understand how she uses her years of experience to create designs that fit with our Humane Web approach. 

“Sites should be designed with all users in mind,” she says.

That means 

• Working to AA WCAG standards as a minimum
• Colour combos are verified and changed if required. (Clients can sometimes change their brand guidelines to be more accessible because of this)  
• Fonts chosen for legibility rather than following a trend 
• Important information and hierarchy are prioritised to allow users to easily navigate the sites

Encouragingly, accessibility recommendations are the most readily accepted by clients.

And what of designing with the planet in mind? What measures does Chânelle employ to keep the weight of a site down? 

For her it’s all about pragmatism coupled with sustainable design knowledge. The lowest page weight possible for each use case or user journey is the right approach. Optimising and minimising is more important than the lowest overall weight. 

A donation journey is a good example.  Including heavier elements, such as videos, animations or images often makes for a more engaging and effective experience. Increased engagement equates to maximised donations for important causes. Sacrificing fundraising for increased lower carbon scores isn’t justifiable. Minimising the carbon score for the right features is. 

A close relationship with the dev team is important here. There’s no point in designing a feature that isn’t possible within the low weight methodology that Wholegrain is so proud of. 

And what about client relationships? A Humane Web approach means that corners can’t be cut. On the face of it, it might seem that simple, effective designs are easier to create. In reality the opposite is true. There’s nowhere to hide for these types of designs. Information has to be readily available, not obfuscated by vertical scrolling and distracting transitions. Explaining design decisions in this context relies on buy in from clients and clear communication from our side. 

In Chânelle’s experience there is a difference between what the design and development community vote for on site showcases and what users actually want. A lot of the heavier features you see on showcases like Awwwards are not actually very popular with users.

Usability takes precedence over flashy features. 

The Humane Web approach in action

2026 looks likely to see this Humane Web approach really take flight. Tantalisingly some of the design work that Chânelle is most excited about is just over the horizon. When I ask what we should be looking forward to she mentions some client sites that are currently in development and a rebranded suite of Wholegrain sites that should launch later this year. I’ve seen some of these designs and agree that they’re pushing the boundaries of what a “sustainable website” looks like.  

Watch this space for some beautifully usable and accessible sites launching in 2026.  They are going to show the industry what a better web can look like for all of us.

You can find more articles on our working practices and the people that bring them to life here.

When I wrote about curating web content in my last article the concept of Discovery kept coming up. It’s a vital part of what makes Wholegrain’s projects successful isn’t something we talk about all that often. Given its importance I sat down with our Head of Experience Design Tod Khanian to learn more about the process, how he has evolved the agency’s approach and what it means in the context of the Humane Web.

So what is it?

Neilson Norman summarises it as:

Tod puts it more simply. To him “Discovery is figuring out what the audience and organisational needs are for a website and then translating those needs into how a website looks, how it’s structured and how it works.”

Simplicity and efficacy are watch words where Tod is concerned. In the two years Tod has been at Wholegrain he’s been working to improve the solid foundations he found when he joined the agency. He’s worked with the team to formalise a process that provides balanced, human focussed, actionable outputs that our talented team can use to build successful websites.

Essentially, clients always come with ideas about how a site should work and the goals it should help achieve. The Discovery phase helps flesh out what was contained in the brief and identify anything that might be missing. It provides the data points required to confirm the project parameters. At the end of the process it provides guidance that helps the Studio transform an organisation’s requirements into a beautiful, human friendly website. It provides insights into site maps, taxonomy, structure and also Experience Principles, which we’ll return to later. 

Who gets involved?

As you might expect, Tod is the lead on all our Discovery processes. Who else is involved depends on the type, complexity and budget of the project. For simple builds, such as a brochure type site, Tod will lead a precise information gathering phase. In this case you could expect a workshop to define objectives and touch points as well as goals for how the site will support the organisation.

As projects become more complex, more input is required. It may seem counter intuitive but a simplified UX journey could mean a much more complicated back end. Where this is the case our Tech Leads will collaborate with Tod and the client to discuss APIs, integrations and cutting edge site components. The experience our Development teams bring means that the correct solutions are found but also identifies where compromise, either budgetary or technological, may be required.

On the client side, who we speak to depends once again on the budget and type of project. Discovery for smaller projects can often be undertaken with a single knowledgeable stakeholder. For larger projects, multiple workshops may take place, user interviews conducted and industry focussed research projects undertaken.  

What does our Discovery process look like?

All together now:

“it depends on the project!”

No two Discovery phases are the same, just as no two websites are the same. Even so our Discovery phases all follow similar lines no matter the budget or size of the project. They are based on confirming the organisational and therefore website objectives. These are agreed at the start of the process. From there the watchwords are collaboration and iteration. We collaborate internally and with client stakeholders to focus on the core goals of the site. We work iteratively to ensure that everyone on the project is comfortable with the progress and agree with the direction and findings.  

Larger projects mean longer information gathering phases. Our most in-depth discovery phases can have larger budgets than whole site builds. Where we are involved in multiphase development projects the discovery phase can last months. Stakeholder availability and long term planning can be key. Tod reiterated that Discovery is a vital investment for a successful project.

The more time spent defining site goals and user and project requirements at the beginning of a project nearly always results in a better end product. This is especially important when the project is part of a long relationship between client and Studio.

Most recently this has been true for our work with the International Association of Public Transport (UITP). When redesigning and rebuilding their website the discovery process allowed us to understand the needs of the variety of stakeholders who engage with the organisation. Through the Discovery process we were able to collaborate in a two pronged approach to helping users find the right information more easily. On the Wholegrain side we created an intuitive and simple to use site with a bespoke search UI and improved internal taxonomy. On the UITP side they used the findings to help update and refresh content, allowing for improved findability and relevancy across their content library.

The result? Through our efficient and human centered approach UITP were able“to break down the corporate structure and better highlight the wide variety of knowledge, events and advocacy content available for our users.”

You can read more about the work we carried out with UITP here.

What is the output?

As with any web agency we’re looking for elements that form the foundations of a website:

• Site maps 
• Taxonomy
• Page structure 
• Key user journeys 
• Core components 
• Site features

But because we’re not just any agency we look for some additional key insights from the Discovery process.  In line with our Humane Web principles we take a more human centred approach. Based on our research, findings and discussions we define a set of Experience Principles for our builds. These aren’t technical or design based. They are a set of statements that provide a framework for the project team to work within.

Some principles come from our beliefs as an ethical and sustainability focussed agency and apply to all our sites: 

• The site will be accessible and inclusive – built to AA WCAG 2.2 standards
• The site will be light weight and energy efficient in line with sustainable web design principles
• The site will be intuitive to use and easy to navigate

Others will be project or site specific. For example:

• A new site for Wholegrain should “reflect the joy and positivity our BCorp status represents”. 
• A site for Extinction Rebellion should “reflect the urgency of the climate crisis”

These Experience Principles are what allow us to get right to the heart of any project. They allow us to see things in a different way. Sites that initially look like they have the same user experience challenges as any other site in their sector are shown to be anything but. For instance, a flashy, cutting edge design that mimics a competitor in the field might not work for your audience if they are older or less tech savvy.

Whatever the project, these Experience Principles are prompts that our Studio team can refer back to to keep things on track, designers, developers and project managers alike. Equally importantly our clients can use them as anchor points when discussing our work at various project milestones. 

Wrapping up

As you can see, the Discovery phase is a hugely integral part of all Wholegrain’s projects. It allows all stakeholders in a project, both internal and external to align and drive things forwards. With Tod on board our process is simple, yet sophisticated and provides technological solutions to human problems.

If your organisation is planning a new site build or wants to improve an existing site, get in touch with Bailey to see how our agency can help.

You can find more articles on our working practices and the people that bring them to life here.