Sustainable Schools
Requirements
I was approached by Fluent Interaction in May of 2009 to undertake a substantial overhaul of the Department of Children, Schools and Families' (DCSF) current 'Sustainable Schools' website. The site was visibly dated in appearance and was completely static, meaning that updates were made by employees sending change requests to the IT department with access to the HTML code.
The goal was to improve the usability of the site via CSS, but more importantly, to create an administration section of the site that allowed staff to control every single aspect of it via an intuitive user interface. Finally, existing content needed to be transferred to the new database to ensure that content initially available was still available after development.
The Solution
I developed a content management system in Coldfusion (requested by the client) that allows staff to manage:
1.) The structure of the site. Pages can be created, edited, deleted and ordered as requested.
2.) Page fragments. Fragments of code, such as a 'Search', 'Related Content' and 'Last Visited' fragments can be effortlessly turned on or off on each page.
3.) Content. Content can be created, reviewed, published and then applied to pages.
4.) News and Event sections. These sections, that were not part of the intial static design allow staff create content that do not need to be assigned to a specif page, but can be found within their relative sections.
Vast CSS improvements were made to the site by both myself and staff at Fluent Interactive to ensure that the site is much more usable than it was previously.
Update
As of 2011, the new British Governemnt have replaced all 'teachernet' sites with the newly created 'Department of Education'. The sustainable schools site is now only available via the archives.