Leeds City Council has run the Leeds Relational Practice Centre for over 6 years. It is an initiative that supports children and families in the Leeds area in a number of areas including inter-relational skills, child care and education. Founded in order to achieve a better outcome for families and young people in Leeds, the LRPC provides information and support through their website and outreach programs.
LRPC had two main objectives for their new website. The first aim was to provide information and resources to the families and young people that they support. LRPC provides events, activities and focused support to its users, requiring a number of specific functionalities surrounding event organization and easy access to relevant information.
The second objective was to provide a resource and portal for the staff of the LRPC. Owing to the constant addition of new relevant documents, the LPRC required a digital filing system where staff of varying access levels could both supply and access files and documents of varying specifications (PDF, Doc, Video, etc). An advanced file search system would also be required, where specific keywords and categories could be filtered to find the relevant information quickly.
Since the LRPC is a government owned and operated website, available to the public, there was also a legal requirement to be compliant with the WGAC 2.0 regulation. This requires publicly accessible websites to be fully accessible to those with a range of usability challenges.
LRPC would also require a website that they would be able to update and make changes to as needed.
Full redesign of the existing LRPC website.
The first part of the project consisted of a completely new design for the LRPC website. Since there was an existing website in place, the first challenge was to complete a full review of the current sitemap and optimize it to make the navigability of the new website more streamlined and create a better user experience. Once this had concluded, the UI of the entire website was designed from scratch, creating a beautiful, yet functional experience for its users while complying with the WCAG 2.0 regulations.
Development of website & functionality.
After the website was visually designed it was then developed onto the WordPress platform. A number of functionalities were then developed and configured including an events portal, a resource area and an advanced filing system with search parameters. NexusBond then configured a membership system with specific restrictions so that specific content is only available to those with the correct level of access.
Finally an audit was undertaken to ensure compatibility with the WCAG 2.0 regulation. A widget was then added to allow users with accessibility requirements to better navigate the website.
The final result was a beautiful, functional new website for Leeds City Council’s LRPC. The website has been up and running for some time now and has delivered thousands of resources, events and important information to its users while allowing LRPC’s staff to easily manage and organize their internal resources. NexusBond continues to support Leeds City Council with their future development needs.
