About the website
Staffordshire County Council's Web team worked closely with our Contensis team of experts to build an outstanding set of websites. They showed great enthusiasm for the latest release of our CMS, and were genuinely excited about applying some of the latest functionality to their projects.
The main Staffordshire County Council website has of course been the main focus - and working within a neat new framework and a new design, the Contensis CMS has helped them build a great website. The latest in CMS functionality has enabled them to build a number of new features into their website, such as:
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improved navigation options (the top 'mega menu' is fully automated)
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improved access to the latest news
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improved syndication options
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extended search functionality
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better content taxonomy / metadata / tagging
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integration of the latest social networking components
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advanced caching options
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consistent (permission based) methods to providing documents to end users
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consistent (permission based) methods to providing video, audio and other rich media content to end users
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XHTML compliant output
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a series of accessibility improvements
The contensis solution
A complete migration process took place - and using Contensis Blueprint tools we successfully identified 1000's of webpages and documents from their old CMS and transferred the content into a new structure.
A set of intelligently built templates help their web team keep control over the more finite (and usually difficult) areas of the website. Using the Contensis subtemplating system they can define great looking page layouts easily - at page editing level - by using simple drag and drop methods.
The website has been built to conform to the latest standards - using .NET, XHTML, CSS and Jquery - the site provides a fast, responsive experience with a good design and an intelligent layer of interactivity.
One important aspect during this project was that a consistent working environment should be provided across more than one project (website). The Staffs team needed to be able to approach each of their separate websites and be able to re-use site components, media and templates. The website editors at Staffs needed to have confidence so that they could go and create a new website from scratch without hiccups - and base it upon the solid foundations set with the main Staffs website. The Contensis CMS helped with laying these foundations, and through the use of Consultation periods and the Contensis Training Programme they found that transferring the right knowledge across to their internal department has been wholly achievable.
In summary
The timeframes from project start to end were fairly short, and in that time the Staffordshire Web team used Contensis to build a number of websites (and even their intranet). Their team also quickly built up their own knowledge of the Contensis CMS - as administrators, editors and developers - and took the final web projects into their own hands.