Work > BANES Carers' Centre

Client: BANES Carers' Centre
Web: www.banescarerscentre.org.uk

We beat 6 other web development companies to be given the opportunity to design and build the new Bath and North East Somerset Carers’ Centre website. The pitch was won based on our experience and understanding of creating accessible websites for charities and educational institutions as well as our proposed feature rich content and interactive elements.

The website was designed inline with the Carers’ Centre current branding and was required to appear professional as well as accessible. The site needed to immediately connect with all the different types of carers. In order to establish this from the beginning we created a slideshow on the homepage that cycles through images of six different carer types and age ranges. Therefore allowing association and connection through relevant imagery.

The homepage also includes clear call to action buttons for both Carers and referrer’s of carers, a latest events calendar and an RSS newsfeed from the Princess Royal Trust for Carers.

We introduced a related pages feature on all pages in order to encourage further exploration of the website as well as integrating a 3rd party forum to allow carers to interact with each other in an informal and anonymous environment.

It was essential for the website to achieve the highest level of accessibility. This includes the following elements.

• All pages in this website validate using the W3C XHTML Markup Validation Service, and all pages comply with all priority 1 checkpoints of the W3Cs Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 which gives this web-site a conformance level of "A"
• Accesskeys to enable users to select the appropriate key on their keyboards and navigate to a particular link. Accesskeys can also be useful to people who have trouble controlling the mouse and clicking on links.
• Skip navigation button to allow users of screen reading software such as JAWS to skip straight to content rather than reading through all menu items.
• Users of the website can change the default size of text on the website. There are three different options – small, medium and large.
• Users can view the website in three different colours - Hign contrast, white on black and the default brand colours.
• We worked with Easy-Read-Online to translate the main section of the website into Easy Read for users who have difficulty in reading and writing. We created a new section within the website to accommodate this information which included a separate style, larger font sizes and appropriate picture positioning.

The website is built around a bespoke build of our CMS – Artisan to allow for easy and complete updating of the website.