Shoreditch Town Hall

Enhancing accessibility and compatibility of corporate website

Shoreditch Town Hall tapped into Digital Overload's technical expertise to make sure that their website's content and functionality were available to as many users as possible.

Client aims

Shoreditch is a historic area of central London. The Town Hall is an imposing, fully restored Victorian building on Old Street, used today as a venue for social gatherings and corporate events.

Shoreditch Town Hall is a client of Orangutan Studio, our strategic partners. As part of a site redesign, we were asked to create 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 Town Hall 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.

The Javascript-powered gallery section of the site posed unusual challenges. The functionality for enlarging images, while simple as a concept, involved the creation of a semantic template that would still work in the CMS environment.

Results

Shoreditch Town Hall's site now presents information quickly and clearly in an attractive manner. With the richer experience provided by the use of Web 2.0 technologies, statistics show that users are now exploring more of the site, resulting in more enquiries.