Action in Rural Sussex
Business Description
Action in rural Sussex (AirS) was established in 1931 as Sussex Rural Community Council and has worked with rural communities since then.
Their vision for Sussex is that it is a place where an active community life is valued equally alongside economic success. The role of Action in rural Sussex is to provide practical help and support to villages in Sussex enabling them to be vibrant living and working places. In addition to their practical work with rural communities, they assist in identifying needs and issues in rural Sussex and champion needs with policy and decision makers, helping to ensure that there is a rural voice for Sussex.
Project Description
AirS works with many parish communities across many districts in Sussex. On top of that they also offer a large number of services to these communities in order to support and improve resources and facilities in these rural areas.
Due to the number of services AirS has to offer and the number of communities they support, AirS required a website that not only provided general company information to Internet users but also displayed and promoted what services are available to these communities through AirS and how AirS can help them improve their communities in many different aspects. AirS were keen to use fresh new graphical representations of data to improve ease of use for users and improve the average number of page views over the old website.
AirS also wanted to be able to start facilitating the membership process online, promoting organisational updates and news via multiple web BLOG's and promote local events that AirS are both holding and supporting. Usability was going to be vitally important to the success of the site due to the number of differing user groups with differing levels of computer knowledge.
Solution
After having spent 4 weeks implementing user profiling and usability testing, we had the perfect platform the begin designing and building the functionality that would make the new AirS website a success. User profiling allowed AirS to understand exactly who their users were, what tasks they needed to perform and what their personal and technical limitation were. All this information was available to us before we even began to draw up functional specifications and sitemaps. We were then able to design and build a website prototype based on the profiles to test the initial website layout and functionality. After having physically tested a number of users from each user profile group we managed to draw up a picture of the initial drawbacks and pitfalls of the initial prototype. Both these process helped tremendously to ensure we built a solution for the users of the website and not employees at AirS.
The website was built using our StrawberrySystem content management solution and had a number of bespoke modules to allow AirS admin to add new communities and services whenever they required. The CMS was also built to manage membership and newsletter subscriptions, internal job opportunities at AirS and much more. This website was a typical example of a fully bespoke content managed web solution from start to finish and allowed us to investigate user needs and requirements right from the start; something we have found helped to make the final result successful.
website: http://www.ruralsussex.org.uk
