Project case study

Norwich Cathedral

Planning a redesign and providing ongoing support

Summary

Production of a plan for their site’s redesign after a period of consultancy

Objective

The site had great content but needed to improve its navigation and organisation so that it would be more user-friendly for the visitor. At the same time the site was going to be bought up to date with contemporary best practice - web standards, accessibility etc.

Solution

Enjoyed an ongoing relationship with Norwich Cathedral, providing technical consultancy on an ad-hoc basis, leading a small workshop where basic HTML was taught and the necessary skills to use Dreamweaver, Photoshop and FTP to update the site in-house. Periodically we were called on to add further features or functionality and these included some temporary measures to address navigational and structural issues, and the addition of a gallery and error pages. More recently, we helped source provision of an online donations facility for their Campaign Fund and put Norwich in touch with JustGiving, a company that specialises in this area.

The major project for Norwich came when they decided to redesign their site, recognising that it required re-organisation and to become more user-friendly and that it needed to come in line with the latest standards and best practice. We went through an extended period of consultancy which included a content audit, heuristic survey, analysis of site statistics, and taking on board responses to a questionnaire to all key stakeholders for new ideas and in order to understand which areas they had problems with in their day to day use of the site.

After this, we developed a site outline diagram to illustrate the structure of a website which took into account reorganisation of the site’s current and future additional content according to the changed needs it was facing. This was again performed with the participation of a group of key stakeholders, though this time a smaller nucleus of the earlier group.

This became formalised in a set of rough wireframe designs, blueprints for the site structure and a content outline which showed what was to be included on each page. These were delivered in a package accompanying a proposal that outlined the reasoning behind decisions and provided a clear funding pitch. This was supplemented by some more specific documents that included recommendations for improvement of the website’s online shop.

Client

Norwich Cathedral

Sector

Arts & Culture
Faith
Heritage
Tourism & Leisure

Date

February 2003 - December 2008

Services provided

Status

Offline