A Refugee and Migrant Community Support Website for Southampton.
Overview of our process
Townside began an consultative period with current users and business sponsors to understand the extent of this project, this included the following steps:
- Research and needs analysis.
- Definition of site goals.
- User-friendly and accessible graphic design.
- Mobility access design.
- Web-friendly content.
- Multi lingual translation of content and publication.
Examples of the old and new web sites
BEFORE - Click here to see...
AFTER - Click here to see...
Overview and Objectives
The primarily objective of the trial will be to address the need for improved delivery of more relevant information to the migrant community in Southampton.
Secondary objectives will be to improve the overall quality and accessibility of information and to facilitate better communication with CLEAR and other Partners to ensure quicker issue resolution.
Improve the customer journey, therefore the time taken and overall experience, in finding relevant information
- Simplified main headings and structure
- Logical links to related topics, so you don’t have to navigate all the way back to home screen
- Local language option for improved accessibility and indexing on search engines
- Instant message chat to ask questions for further inquiries
- External links to associated websites for more relevant information
- Mobile phone compatibility to enable access when and where customers need
There was limited visitor traffic, peaking around 20 visits per day. There are no searches with any non local language terms.
Design of our new site
The design of the new Southampton community website included a new information architecture and a simple, clean design.
The home page consists of four main navigation areas, including:
- Language selection, identified by flag
- Top category navigation for top level search engine indexing in every language.
- Object based category selection via easily identifiable images
- Collapsible left navigation, for each user group
The new site design had to accommodate 12 languages for launch with the flexibility to build more if required, the additional languages enabled
- Multi lingual on site search functionality
- Greater accessibility
- Increased content indexed by Google and other search engines.
Technology used to Implement
After understanding the objectives and design requests, only a couple of application routes were left available. (Joomla, WordPress, Bespoke).
Due to the excellent mutli lingual capability within WordPress and easy to use management to lower ongoing cost, it was chosen as the application on which this solution would be built.
During the developmental cycle we were impressed by the flexibility and capabilities of working with WordPress.
Conclusion
The website was launched in July 2010, the website provides an information portal for the migrant and refugee population of Southampton in 12 languages. Endorsed by Paul Leppit, Project Manager at CLEAR (City Life Education and Action for Refugees) “CLEAR is really pleased with the finished outcome; an outstanding website providing for the migrant community and one that has met with acclaim from the target audience and from partner organizations alike.”
Within weeks on it’s launch it is noticeable the increase in new users, especially from people searching the website using an alternative language to English.
The site regularly attracts over 200 visits per day a 10 fold increase of the previous solution.
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