Design and development of a large website using Kentico CMS for this national charitable trust.
Goals
The NBN (National Biodiversity Network) is a collaborative project, bringing together many of the UK’s wildlife conservation organisations, the government and country agencies, environmental agencies, local records centres and also many voluntary groups.
The NBN Trust has a facilitative role and leads on communications for the NBN. The NBN Trust put out to tender a project to integrate three different web sites: the NBN website itself; the NBN Gateway, a complex database of species records; and the NBN Forums, all of which had different designs, were run independently of each other and which needed to be pulled together under one site. The design of each was dated and needed refreshing and visitor experience of the sites was believed to be poor. Additionally, the main site had also experienced some security issues.
Because the three sites are managed by different organisations, different log in details were required making the user experience frustrating.
The project goals were:
- To develop a web site that could be easily updated by multiple administrators.
- To modernise the design of the main site and skin the Gateway and Forums to visually integrate them.
- To make the site more appealing to visitors as well as easier to use with a single log in.
- To create ‘media libraries’ to manage the many documents that were published across the different partner organisations.
Challenges
Because the client’s web presence is managed by multiple administrators within a number of organisations, each managing a large amount of information, it was important to structure the site and its administrative and publishing permissions accordingly.
The three sites are still hosted and managed separately so it was vital to integrate these into a single point of access that is easy for the visitor to understand and use.
An additional challenge was to ensure that the site appealed to, and was easy to use by, a diverse range of stakeholders across the NBN. This varies from those with a lifelong interest in wildlife, who are now perhaps retired, to school children becoming involved for the first time.
Solutions
The development of the NBN web site took three months. Kentico features enabled the client to achieve their objectives. We used:
- ASPX templates, rather than the portal engine, as the client was keen to have a web site that they couldn’t break. We designed a dozen or so page layouts that could be used throughout the site.
- News and blog management so that the client can easily keep the site’s content fresh.
- Document management and workflow to allow junior staff members to edit the site without the risk of compromising content.
- User-specific navigation to create a different experience with different functionality for different users (e.g. registered customers, employees, etc).
- Event management and booking for the client’s various events, bringing this function online.
- FAQ section to provide useful information to site visitors.
- Web analytics to provide detailed tracking of web use.
- The WYSIWYG editor configured to enable the selection of several different pre-configured styles so that the site can be easily editing without any HTML knowledge.
In addition, we developed specifically for this project, the PDF Builder which enables the visitor to add pages from the website into a personal ‘folder’ which can then be downloaded as their personal guide book.
The client was happy to select Kentico because it is:
- Easy to learn how to use – even for beginners;
- Search engine friendly with plenty of flexibility with site content;
- Uses workflow and versioning to manage multiple versions of a document and control who can authorise changes;
- Flexible, allowing the users to create content in a wide variety of ways.
Results
The sites are now integrated with fully dynamic content and a consistent visual identity. The site is rich with information including 500 downloadable documents and a database of almost 58 million species, all easily manageable by the site’s administrators.
Feedback at the launch of the site was extremely positive, with 88% stating that the new site was very good or excellent. The remaining 12% thought the site was good. The site now handles over 400,000 page views per month, demonstrating the improvements in its user-friendliness.
The site went online in 2008, replacing one that had been in existence since 2000. Unique visitors to the old site in 2007-2008 numbered 18,785 and rose to 31,570 in the new site’s first year, increasing further since.
The web site has now become a significant part of NBN Trust’s communications with its stakeholders. They have moved away from their previous reliance on print communications, now publishing a monthly e-newsletter which links into the web site, something that had not been anticipated prior to the web project but which has brought them additional benefits.