Barrow Cadbury Trust

Improving accessibility and compatibility of corporate website

Barrow Cadbury looked to Digital Overload to help them save staff time and hassle with a content management system and centralised event calendar, plus templates to help developers add future content quickly and easily.

Client aims

The Barrow Cadbury Trust is an independent charitable foundation committed to funding and encouraging the promotion of social justice.

The Trust is a client of Orangutan Studio, our strategic partners. As part of a site redesign, we were asked to create a tailored content management system (CMS) to power several sections of the site, as well as XHTML/CSS templates based on Orangutan's designs that would meet the client's specific requirements in terms of browser compatibility and user accessibility.

Our approach

The main areas powered by the CMS were the news area and the internal events calendar, which allows employees to manage events and important dates. These areas had to be very simple to use, since the staff who would operate them had little or no web editing experience. The bespoke CMS was developed using our own framework, with each technical requirement carefully specified to ensure that data entry would feel as natural and intuitive as possible. Once we had defined the requirement in detail (and suggested some improvements) we moved ahead with the core development.

The Trust wanted to make sure that everyone in their broad target audience could benefit from the website's content. To guarantee this, all of the templates were manually tested to conform to WCAG-AAA guidelines on accessibility for people with disabilities.

Orangutan needed to integrate our templates into a third-party content management system (CMS), so we developed them in a modular fashion allowing the developers to re-use core components quickly and easily and to build pages in a logical way. Comprehensive comments were added to the code, allowing developers (now and in the future) to understand it easily.

We used font rendering software sIFR for headings to enhance the visual quality dynamic content and maintain brand values. Adding value beyond the brief, we also delivered several form templates to make the process of CMS integration easier.

Results

With a simple yet functional CMS in place, the Trust's own web authors can update the site with little effort, freeing their time for other activities. With a centralised, universally accessible calendar in place, the Trust were able to reduce communication problems and manage internal events much more effectively, saving a great deal of time.

The admin area also allows authorised PR contacts to submit news articles for publication on their site. Thanks to the CMS, the Trust can rest assured that the articles will appear in a consistent format without any additional input from their web authors.