Recent work:
NCVO case study

The National Council for Voluntary Organisations has been one of our longest standing clients, and we have been providing website advisory and consulting services to them since 2003.

What we did

In July 2005, it was decided that their existing website, already highly regarded for its content and accessibility standards, was to be redesigned and integrated with a larger scale content management platform.

We recommended NVisage as the development partner due to their expertise with the Ektron content management systems and their experience in the not-for-profit sector. This recommendation was accepted the following month.

Phase one

However, it was crucial that the new NCVO brand and initial re-branded website design was up and running within six weeks; before the Ektron content management system could be integrated.

We were tasked with the previous content management providers to ensure that the existing website was re-templated for the new brand launch in mid-September 2005. This was achieved one week prior to the official brand launch date.

Phase two

With the re-branded temporary website in place, both our and the NVisage team were then free to now design and begin the full redevelopment. The target was late January 2006.

We worked with both NVisage and NCVO to establish the site taxonomy and new extended content/ecommerce site features, whilst also handling the XHTML/CSS2 website template production.

The agreed release version of the new site was ready on time, fully tested.

Phase three

Following an internal review at NCVO in August 2006, we were consulted on the possibilities of taking the site design through a third design iteration.

The primary goal was to maximise visual impact and usability whilst minimising additional development work on the content management front. NCVO were going to use Futurate as the design agency for the new facelift, with sure horizon acting as the project liaison with NVisage.

After a thorough design and due diligence process between the two teams, we were able to transpose Futurate's new, (and very exciting we should point out!), design templates into XHTML/CSS2 for NVisage to slot into the Ektron cms. This work was completed in February 2007.

The current site is available at http://www.ncvo-vol.org.uk.