Royal College of Art
The Royal College of Art commissioned Urban Guru and Airside to produce a new public website and intranet. Urban Guru was responsible for the technical architecture, programming and implementation of the site.The RCA has had several sites built for it over the past few years, but all suffered from the fact that they were not easy to update. This led to a splintering of the organisation's website, with individual departments creating microsites which better addressed their needs.
The RCA needed a site that looked good but was also easy for individual departments to update themselves, so as to unify and consolidate their web presence and brand. The site also needed to be accessible, due to the large number of users with dyslexia and related disorders.On a technical level, the site had to cope with a large number of hits, and also a large number of administration users, most of whom were allowed to update only a small subset of the total site.
Content Management System
Urban Guru produced a content management system that was simple to use and yet extremely powerful. Users were allowed access only to their own specific areas of the site. They were able to modify all elements of these areas, adding and removing pages, moving them around in the table of contents, choosing which of a predefined set of templates to use and of course editing the contents of each page.We made editing pages extremely simple, providing a wizard for users to complete the process. Text editing was performed using a WYSIWYG JavaScript widget which anyone who could use Word or Hotmail would be comfortable with. The text editing tool also allowed users to easily upload inline images and documents, and enabled them to create more complex structures such as tables and lists.
Technical requirements
We met the technical requirements by ensuring the system was a publishing system rather than a totally dynamic one. When website users access the site, they see static pages rather than dynamic ones created on the fly. Pages are updated when administrators click on the 'publish' button after updating the site.This means the site is very scalable, and also much better protected against any malicious attacks. It also means that if the database goes down for any reason the site is not affected - an important consideration for high availability on a relatively low budget.
Outcome
The system has been very successful, to the extent that many departments have closed down their microsites, preferring to use Urban Guru's content management system instead. One year on, we have been employed again to make further enhancements to the site.
"The presentation to the College went really well so thanks for all the hard work! The audience were pretty unanimous in thinking we've got a fantastic site in the making - if the applause at the end was anything to go by." - Will Dallimore, Head of Publishing, Royal College of Art.