Websites

Community Food and Health (Scotland)

Visit their website www.communityfoodandhealth.org.uk

Brief

Community Food and Health (Scotland) needed to replace their old website with one that met web standards and accessibility guidelines.

The new site was to hold a lot more information, both in its pages and as downloadable publications, and this had to be easy to find.

The main new features for the site were to be:

• a library of online publications
• a database of community food projects in Scotland
• a forum to facilitate discussion between people working in food and health
• a site search facility.

CFH also wanted to be able to update and add to the site themselves, using a Content Management System which supported accessibility standards.

To maintain familiarity for users, the new visual design would be development of the existing site design. Community Food and Health wanted the width of the site to vary with the width of the user's web browser.

Tasks and outcomes

First, the project goals were prioritised and the user-tasks defined. From this, we devised a scheme for organising the information. The trickiest area was the library of downloadable publications which needed to be categorised and made searchable.

To ensure that the information on the site was easy to find, we carried out usability testing early in the design process. Volunteers attempted tasks on a prototype version of the site. The results helped us to optimise the information design, which was given a simple but effective look and feel.

The Content Management System gave CFH the additional benefits of a blog for their news items and an events diary.

Finally, we gave the CFH staff training in updating the site, the publications library and the database.