Extratime | Website build
Extratime | Website build
The Brief:
Extratime was founded in 2003 by two parents of disabled children in response to an issue affecting parent carers like them ? a lack of suitable, affordable, childcare for children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) in Brighton & Hove. The team at Extratime provides an amazing service for their community often providing a lifeline to many families across Sussex and it’s been our pleasure to work with them since January 2019.
With their team offering such an amazing service, we needed to ensure the new website would allow them to spread their messages and engage with a much wider audience. Our journey started by working with the Extratime team to create a formal brief highlighting current issues and longer-term vision.
Thankfully Sam & Faye came extremely well prepared, this meant we could move into our kick-off meeting and get straight to the heart of the matter.?At the heart of the brief was a very real concern that parent/carers were simply not using the website, the assumption was the information on the original website was too dense and users couldn’t engage with it. Having spent a few sessions working with the Extratime team to understand their admissions process, class sizes, and support types we were ready to conduct some user testing.
We have loved working with Creative Blend over the past year and with their help we now have a brand new website that we are thrilled with! Due to their professionalism and skill we have continued to find other ways to keep working with them even after the new website was finished.
The Approach:
This started with Grant visiting the Extratime centre and speaking with a few parents. The sessions were covered both in person and digitally where we could begin to really understand where the blockers/problems were. It won’t surprise you to know the parents were very keen to gain additional insights from the website, but they found it easier to get this from Facebook rather than use the website! Although this is understandable (at the time) it was not the behaviour we wanted to encourage as a lot of amazing information was being missed.
With our team fueled with a new brief, and user insights we were ready to jump into the design & development stages – exciting times ahead!
After plotting out the key project acceptance criteria and areas we believe would present worthwhile opportunities, we got cracking with the initial stages of the website build. This stage is of vital importance to guide not only the new content (copy) creation but also to provide us with a ?home? point where we can reference throughout the creation of the website.
Moving into the next stages we worked closely with the Extratime team to work from design ideas, as we came closer to understand their particular tastes our developer Jason was brought into the meetings to take the design concepts into reality!
With some great feedback from the Extratime team, we made quick improvements and before you know it we were coming into the final stages of the project. This led us to optimise pages for SEO benefits (title tags, meta-data and alt tags)? whilst ensuring to upload the latest sitemap into Google Console to allow the website to begin ranking as quickly as possible.?
Some highlights from the project:
- WordPress build working with some custom features to pull in new feeds and allow for ease of use
- Website training provided to adminstrators
- Ability to add in new fundraising and donation methods
- Tested for accessibility prior to launch
- Technical SEO best practices included
- Integrated video throughout
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