A webpage with a lush rainforest background and a thatched-roof house in the foreground.

Cool Earth

We transformed Cool Earth’s website from a technical migration into a platform built for discovery, donations and long-term change.

Cool Earth’s organic search traffic was slipping, and more relevant queries were resolving inside AI answer snippets before anyone clicked through. We were engaged to migrate and stabilise the site, rebuild the CMS and design system, and develop a content and search strategy fit for how people now search.

Visit site
A promotional screen for the "COOL EARTH" organization, encouraging donations to support Indigenous peoples and local communities in their fight against the climate crisis.
A webpage with a light background, featuring a logo for "COOL EARTH" at the top left corner.
A promotional page for "Cool Earth" with a focus on their rainforest research.

Untangling the legacy

Proprietary plugins limited portability, binding the site to its old host; we moved it onto hosting Cool Earth could own outright.

We utilised infrastructure that runs on 100% green data centers matching the climate charity’s own values.

A collection of web design mockups displayed on a dark background.

A design that moves

Making the homepage modular enables Cool Earth’s team reorder what matters most without touching code, or waiting on us.

Human After All’s brand guidelines set the visual direction; we built the design system to carry them through, large, uncropped images doing the talking with each module built to be flexible enough to adapt to changing priorities.

A webpage with a lush, green rainforest background.
A webpage with a header containing the "COOL EARTH" logo, navigation links, and a donate button.
The main content highlights the achievements of "Adventurists" who are involved in saving the world through various adventures.
A simple graphic design with a dark green background.
A group of people sitting on the ground in a lush, green environment filled with trees and plants.

Content built to be found

Analysis of the archive surfaced eleven themes buried in a date-ordered blog, the basis for rebuilding the site around how search engines and AI assistants now retrieve information.

Rather than produce more posts or delete the low traffic pages, we ran an analysis that surfaced eleven distinct themes, split the catch-all Stories section into Articles and News, each anchoring spoke articles, with low-performing pages folded into pillar content rather than discarded.

A webpage with a green background and a header containing the logo of "COOL EARTH" with navigation options such as "Our Mission", "Radical Solutions", "Impact", "Stories", and "Act Now".

Impact

Cool Earth’s donor value grew even as raw traffic fell, the clearest sign the archive’s worth survived the shift in how people search.

In the year following the relaunch, Cool Earth saw donations and online income grow by more than a fifth, alongside a steady lift in donation-page conversion. The ongoing strategy work on the content archive has resulted in massive visibility gains, with large average keyword position gains, especially in the highest ranking terms.

Aug 2026

A black-and-white ship on ice beside a portrait of Alfred Wegener seated at a desk

Drift

In 1912 Alfred Wegener told a room of geologists that the continents move. He was right. The one thing he couldn’t explain was how, and it took half a century of sonar and magnetometers, instruments that read the magnetism in rock, to prove it.

Jul 2026

One of the 214 hand-drawn sheets of Inō’s map of Japan, and his team surveying Mitarai in 1806

Measure

In 1800 a retired sake brewer named Inō Tadataka set out to walk Japan’s coast. He spent 17 years and 35,000 km on foot, and died before the work was done. His team finished the first accurate map of Japan in 1821, and it stayed in use for a century.

Jun 2026

William Badcock, A Touch-stone for Gold and Silver Wares (1677)

Hallmark

The word hallmark comes from an actual hall, Goldsmiths’ Hall in London, where since 1300 silver has been tested against the sterling standard and struck with the hall’s mark, so you could trust it without knowing the maker.

May 2026

Alan Kay: His Sketches, Piano, and Computer

Notes

A note can be a written record, a struck key, or the act of noticing, and each sharpens how we understand the world. A piano is an instrument, but also a technology built on the notes it makes possible.

Apr 2026

Photographs of a red cloth bound travel handbook from 1894. The book is open to show pages with maps and illustrations.

Change

A red cloth spine caught my eye in a Tokyo bookshop last week. A handbook for travellers in Japan, fourth edition, 1894. I was 132 years late, yet most of what it describes still stands.

Mar 2026

Screenshots from the development process of the new ON release notes page

Taking the temperature

You walk into a room and you can feel it. Whether there is energy or not. We describe someone as warm. We talk about things cooling down. Temperature is something we sense before we have words for it.

Feb 2026

Pixelised image of a horse running

Rethinking video, prototyping faster, and encoding brand logic

In Japanese, the character for hand is 手. Joined with the character for craft, it becomes 手仕事 (teshigoto), or handwork.

Want to know more?

On the last Sunday of every month, we share insights on creative thinking, emerging tools, technology.

Privacy policy

Last updated: today

Link to ON’s Linkedin Page Link to ON’s Instagram Page

More case studies

Splend

Rebuilding multi-market vehicle financing on a data model built for city-level pricing.

Libeo

Facilitating a smooth digital transition for a cloud-based payments service to simplify business finance.

Morro

Driving direct rental revenue with a self-serve search and booking platform.