Twickenham's Town Centre Management Board commissioned Assanka to provide new content management facilities and an event and venue database for twickenhamtown.co.uk, coinciding with a new design. The new facilities make for a more engaging, more useful and more productive site.
The historic and world famous town of Twickenham owes much of its fame to rugby; and as the Rugby Football Union plan a new stand for the stadium that will see it cement its reputation as one of the world's finest sporting venues, the town itself is not getting left behind.
The Twickenham Town Centre Management Board (TCMB) was created in 1998, to promote Twickenham and improve economic sustainability. Working with the local community, council and businesses, the town centre manager has five strategic objectives to help Twickenham to thrive.
There was already a site at twickenhamtown.co.uk, which had not been updated for some time. There was no provision for non-specialists to manage content, and so every time a content update was required, the original developer had to be commissioned to make the changes.
Esther Worboys, the current town centre manager, saw the need for change.
"The Twickenham Town Centre Website was in great need of a revamp when I started as Town Centre Manager. The graphics were tired, the information was out of date, and we were having to pay a designer each time we wanted to make even a small text change, which took a long time, was inflexible and had obvious budget implications! I decided that I wanted to combine a fresh graphical interface with a content management system that would make it easy for me to keep the site updated."
We were brought in to work with a designer that had already been selected by Esther. Our brief was initially to convert the designer's work into web pages - a process we call 'rendering the design'. Accessibility was a vital concern, since improving accessibility of town services is one of the strategic objectives of the TCMB.
"We all got together to scope the site plan and the whole process ran relatively smoothly from there (much more so than any of my previous web projects). Assanka were very thorough in producing detailed documents. Parameters were agreed from the outset so that my designer knew exactly how much creative flexibility he had. Fortunately Assanka were able to accommodate most of his ideas and so there was little of the conflict that there often is between a site looking good and working properly."
We achieved the final look and feel that Esther wanted with a tableless layout conforming to the XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2 standards laid out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The site renders perfectly in all modern web browsers, and falls back to plain text if the styles are not loaded, which also makes it accessible to screen readers (used by blind visitors) and mobile devices such as PDAs and mobile phones.
There were three elements of development to the site:
- Content Management System
- What's on (event calendar)
- Where to go (venue directory)
To satisfy the content management requirements, we selected the Assanka CMS, a reusable product that we can deploy quickly and inexpensively to provide powerful control over the content of a website. While the CMS product features a whole suite of productivity tools, this application required a very basic implementation, so it was customised by removing those components that were not necessary.
What's on and Where to go were bespoke developments. What's on is a list of the events happening in the town over the coming days, weeks, and months. We knew that there would be a regular stream of events, but that some events of greater importance might be happening after a number of less important ones. We dealt with this by displaying featured events in key locations to ensure that visitors' attention was directed at the most important event.
Visitors were empowered by giving them the option of suggesting new events for the calendar. We also added a natural language search engine, and two separate calendar-style views completed the section.
At a review of the site three months after launch, we suggested that old events be retained to ensure links from search indexes and other sites were not broken. We created a new, clearly labelled template to ensure visitors knew the difference between "What's on" and "What Was on"! At this point repeating events were also introduced, giving the TCMB the ability to create chains of regular events with unrivalled ease.
Where to go was a similar challenge, and is presented in much the same way, with a featured venue occupying the same space on the right hand side of the Where to go section. We also used the same natural language search system. The real jewel of this section, though, is the beautiful hand-drawn map of the town centre.
We made as much as possible of the map by dividing it up into grid squares and allowing each one to be individually loaded at its full resolution. The map was also made available in full as a downloadable PDF file.
The site benefits from our standard site management toolkit, in which we placed the content management administration module, bespoke modules for What's on and Where to go, and standard statistics and support modules to provide the Town Centre Manager with site traffic information at her fingertips and a clear channel of communication should she require support.
The complete package brings together a full compliment of essential tools and empowers the client with an enormous variety of choices in the way they choose to use the site. Esther is more than satisfied with the finished product.
"We have ended up with a fresh new site, within our budget, that is much more up-to-date and with only a few teething problems which have always been rectified promptly and with little fuss! Traffic has been steadily increasing and I've had good feedback from visitors. Assanka have continued to be helpful since launch, adding new features (an enhanced admin interface and more statistical tools) and I would like to take this opportunity to thank them for a job well done!"
Our technology choices for this project were PHP for the software development, the mySQL database server and an Apache web server running on a Red Hat Linux host. We often select these technologies together for low to medium volume web applications, because since all are open-source they offer exceptionally good value for the customer, and benefit from a huge amount of expertise available in the marketplace.
With sites like this demonstrating our credentials for producing websites on time, on budget and fit for purpose, Assanka is the ideal choice for businesses who want to take the internet seriously.