Cumbria Law Centre is a charity, established in 1990, providing free legal advice and assistance on housing, debt, employment, and welfare benefits to people across Cumbria. Based in Carlisle, serving the wider county – their service users are typically the people who need legal help most and can afford it least.
We’ve been their digital partner since 2010 – sixteen years and several site builds. When they got in touch in February 2026 to ask if we could still honour a discounted-rate offer we’d put out in August 2025, the answer was yes. Their existing site was overdue a rebuild, and a charity helping vulnerable people in our own county wasn’t somewhere we were going to drive a hard bargain.
When someone needs free legal advice on a housing eviction, a benefits sanction, or a debt crisis, the first place they look is online. For Cumbria Law Centre’s service users – people on low incomes, often in difficult situations, frequently accessing the web on older phones with limited data – the old website was getting in the way of that help being found.
The site itself wasn’t broken. It was just stuck. The WordPress theme and plugins it was running couldn’t be safely upgraded past PHP 7.4 without crashing – a serious security risk by 2026 – and the accessibility built into the site was years out of date. Visitors with low vision, cognitive impairments, motor difficulties, or simply a small screen and a slow connection were having to fight the website to find the help they needed. For a charity whose mission is removing barriers to legal advice, this was the wrong kind of barrier in the wrong place.
The brief was clear: a rebuilt site, on modern foundations, aligned with the Law Centre Network’s brand guidelines, accessible to every visitor, and ready to keep running for the next decade. Budget mattered, because budgets always matter for charities.
We started where the old site had stopped: the foundations. The new site was built on current WordPress, current PHP, and the Law Centre Network’s brand guidelines (supplied by the client on day one and applied faithfully throughout).
Accessibility was treated as a feature, not a checkbox. Every page was built with standards-compliant markup, sufficient colour contrast, proper heading structure, and keyboard navigability – the basics that make a site usable for screen readers and assistive tech. On top of that, we built in an accessibility menu visible from every page: visitors can change font sizes, colour schemes, contrast levels, and highlight links – controls that put the choice in the hands of the person reading rather than assuming we know best.
Content migration was done page by page. The client wanted some outdated material removed in the process, so we worked through what stayed, what went, and what needed rewriting before publish. Hosting was set up on a stack that won’t get stuck the way the old one did – when PHP 8.5 ages out, the site will be upgradable without drama.
Eight weeks from brief to launch, on a discounted rate that matched the charity’s budget without compromising what was delivered.
The new Cumbria Law Centre site has been live since April 2026. It loads faster, looks current, follows the Law Centre Network’s brand guidelines, and – most importantly – meets the people who need it where they are.
The accessibility menu means a visitor with low vision can boost the contrast and increase the text size in two clicks, on any page. A visitor on a low-end phone gets a site built to be lightweight. A visitor who’s never used the internet to find legal help before doesn’t have to fight the navigation to get there.
PHP went from 7.4 to 8.5.7 – modernised in a single jump, with the security and longevity that brings. Content was migrated cleanly and updated. And the relationship that’s now sixteen years long got renewed for another build.
We delivered a fully rebuilt WordPress website – modern, accessible, faster, and aligned with the Law Centre Network’s brand guidelines. The new site replaces a build that had been frozen on legacy infrastructure for years, and gives Cumbria Law Centre a digital home that genuinely supports the people they’re trying to help.
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