Great Aycliffe menu tabs
Great Aycliffe is a vibrant community, set in an attractive semi-rural setting. The area administered by the Town Council contains many attractive green spaces but their website did not reflect the hard work the Councillors do. However, their recent website revamp is allowing even the most technically inexperienced councillors to update and maintain the website.
The new site is being used as a community tool for both residents and visitors to find out all about Aycliffe, including local events and activities taking place in each of their wards and Oakleaf Sports and Golf Complexes.
We created a fully manageable CMS system with various levels of administration. This meant that staff with different levels of responsibility can access and edit menu tabs and relevant parts of the site; councillor login (total access), editor login (news, events and sections), sports (Oakleaf Sports Complex and other sections) and golf admin (just access to Oakleaf Golf Complex site).
Overall, functionality is improved, content is easy to control by the councillors and is easy to find and read from a user-experience point of view.
Old Great Aycliffe website
The councillors and visitors to the website found content hard to find on the never-ending array web pages. Aycliffe’s current web design was created using a template which was old-fashioned; meaning navigation was hard to control, visitors had a less-than-perfect user experience.
Great Aycliffe employees could only contribute news and images; even the simplest of content was time consuming and confusing to upload. Therefore, we enabled them to self-manage their site so any text or extra menu options could be added without having to constantly revert back to us for changes.
New OakLeaf Golf Complex micro site
The micro-sites for the Oakleaf Sports and Oakleaf Golf Complex have a separate link but can still be controlled and managed using the back-end content system of the Aycliffe website, ensuring the council have as much flexibility as possible.
The Oakleaf Golf Complex site has automatic weather updates and allows web visitors to view the holes plus special offers from the course.
The Oakleaf Sports Complex site allows visitors to view the sports schedule according to the day of the week and provides information regarding dining facilities, the Caravan Site, membership options and facility hire.
The beauty of the sites is that they both look separate from the main Council pages. This stops the Great Aycliffe pages from looking cluttered and allows people interested in Sports or Golf only to be directed straight to the relevant site.
Marie Robinson, Leisure and Environment Assistant at Great Aycliffe Council said “Urban River has recently completed our website which we are really pleased with. We love the functionality and interaction of the site, and the menu structure ensures easy navigation even for the most inexperienced user. Although we have experienced some minor teething troubles, we now enjoy editing our web site which is something that could not have been said about our previous three. It’s so simple to use that our managers (who had had no experience at all of web sites) picked it up with relative ease. The fact we can upload loads of documents to the file manager at one time and file them in a ‘windows’ type of environment is great.
I have attended meetings of the Council for 21 years and have never seen them applaud anything before, however that’s what happened at the pre-launch viewing presentation of our new website. Please accept my thanks for Urban River’s work on the site and relay my gratitude to all the staff who were involved.”
