Project overview
Two London based social care organisations combined to create one overarching not for profit organisation to provide a wider unified portfolio of care services, making a simpler point of access for supporting people with learning disabilities, autism and mental health needs.
We collaborated with one of our design agency partners on the web build to provide a new website for them that could cater for the new wider set of services, whilst making content authoring powerful yet simple.
We were deeply involved in site planning meetings to work out the sitemap, services and extra functionality, taking into account the needs of both organisations.
Project objectives
- Provide an intuitive and simple to use content management system
- Create a logical content and information hierarchy
- Develop a custom Job Application board
- Give training to various teams within the organisation
- Deliver ongoing support and development
Development phase
We chose CraftCMS as our content management system for this project due to it's ability to provide a powerful yet simple approach to content authoring, but it is also extendable with custom plug-ins to be able to build the job application system inside it also, meaning a single system for the business to handle all the services on their website, adding to the simplicity for the staff.
The system needed to provide:
- Multi author environment
- Workflows
- Multi channel notifications (email, SMS)
- Custom PDF generation
- Extendability
- Enable author to publisher workflows
- The ability to have an Interactive services by location map
The team here were able to build out the back end content population features of the CMS before the front end implementation was complete, to allow the client staff and our design partner to start the content population in parallel with the site build.
This meant that tight project deadlines could be met and we eliminated any blocking of other people on the project from getting their work done.
Custom development
To support their fast growth, the charity need to advertise for many support roles and at the time were using a third party job application platform. The desire was to bring this in house and we were tasked with building a Job application system that could support:
- Multiple job types
- Multi page application forms
- Job application completion notifications to job owners
- Dedicated account areas for job owners to review applications
- HR specific area with access to restricted information
- Various download options from PDF outputs of the submitted job, to configurable, downloadable reports of the job applications in a Ms Excel compatible format.
A fun part of this development was the concept of "killer questions" within the job applications. The job creators needed to be able to choose specific job application questions that if answered incorrectly, would visually alert the applicant so that they wouldn't apply for jobs that they weren't suitable for. i.e "Do you have a UK driving license?", if this was answered negatively, the user would be alerted at the time and wouldn't be able to submit the job application itself.
The flexibility of the CraftCMS content authoring and templating meant we were able to deliver this functionality with ease.
Outcome
Another large and under the hood, complicated website build was delivered on time and on budget.
We continue to work with our partner and the end client to adapt and define their needs as they change over time.
Ultimately, we were able to deliver the success of this project by taking advantage of the power of the content management system "CraftCMS", and how we extended it to enable a suite of complex features.
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