In 3 months we worked with Care City to create and launch a new and improved website
Care City needed a new website to better reflect their mission, the future direction of the organisation and promote their new hub
Care City is an independent community interest company (CIC) founded by the London Borough of Barking & Dagenham and the North-East London Foundation Trust. It’s an innovation centre for healthy ageing and regeneration with a mission to work with, learn from and support the East London community to live happier, healthier lives.
They work with innovators, integrators, and system partners with the aim of transforming health and social care to better serve their communities. So it’s important to have a website that meets a range of needs, including enabling local people to access what they need quickly and easily. Care City also needed a website that better reflected their mission and future direction and makes it easier for the team to add different types of content.
Unsure about what the new website might look like, they asked our GovPress team to help.
Outcome
It took the team 3 months from starting work on the project to getting the new website live. The new site is much easier for the wide range of users the organisation engages with to navigate and find the information they need.
With an improved content management system (CMS,) it’s also quicker and simpler for the Care City team to update the site.
“We gave dxw a challenging brief! Our website has to appeal to a number of diverse audiences including Funders, Commissioners, Technology Partners and Primary and Social Care networks. And as a Community Interest Company, forge a sense of belonging to the local East London community.
“From initial designs, to daily check-Ins, through to the patience of the team while I upskilled on a new CMS, whilst maintaining a sense of fun, dxw has made the journey to a new website one of ease, creativity and learning.“
Rachel Fuller, Communications Director at Care City
What we did
We knew we needed to create a site that would work for a range of audiences with quite different needs. This included creating image led content for users in the local community whose first language isn’t English, and designing for different types of content from complex reports to action buttons.
The Care City team was also conscious that their existing CMS was difficult to use. This was eating up time for their marketing team.
Starting with the content
They recognised that a lot of their existing content was long, relatively complex, and not created with accessibility in mind. So we began by bringing in one of dxw’s content designers to work with them on a content audit. Thinking about their different audiences, what content needed to be migrated over to the new site, and what that might look like on a page.
Our team of designers and developers then worked with the Care City team to understand their goals for the site, both in terms of functionality and design.
Working collaboratively
We worked in close collaboration, sharing mock pages as we progressed through the build. The Care City team joined us at daily stand ups which helped to speed up feedback loops with a tight deadline to meet. Although time was short, we made sure we built in some flexibility to give us time to properly reflect on the feedback we were getting and iterate our designs.
This project is a great example of what can be achieved in a short space of time. We’re really pleased with the results.