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Sonas Housing Website
Posted on | November 24, 2009 | Comments Off
Redesign and Development
Sonas Housing Association Ltd website has recently been launched, the website work involved a complete fresh new redesign, a new content management solution, a newsletter facility and updating training. The existing site had been in place since 2004. Sonas decided to work with my services to develop a new online presence.
The redesign brief was to create a very easy to use and easy to update website and to organise the many different types of information content needed for the website. The design brief was to base the website look and feel on Sonas’s logo and two colours – pink and purple with lots of white space.
Design
Direction for the design came from the Policy and Communications Officer, Paula at Sonas. This was a really fun site to design and develop. Working with Paula was great and our initial consultation for the redesign provided enough information for me to come up with a design concept – the first design concept which was used by Sonas and which I then built the CMS around.
Navigation
The important part of this website was navigation. The request was for simple left side navigation, recent trends have been to provide top navigation and some other sidebars for sub pages content. The left side navigation really works on this site and adds to the ease of use of the website. Subpages for each section were incorporated into the left side navigation.
Colour
Colour was also the real fun thing to work with on this site. Paula came up with the two colours that were preferred. I used these colours as a contrast to the orange and yellow in the logo, I also did some image manipulation on some photographs I was given to work with and used this in the header area and in the design of the donation button.
Technical
The site was designed and then built with an open source CMS package that was adapted to meet the needs of sonas. Some features developed in this package were adding a news section on the homepage, adding an events section and providing a form to sign up for their newsletter
Newsletter Solution
A newsletter solution was sourced for sonas and a newsletter html template was designed based on the design and colour scheme of the website. Training was provided via documents on how to work with the newsletter solution
Updating
The website is updated and maintained by Sonas with ongoing support provided whenever needed. Training was provided in how to update the website.
The website is for the purposes of providing information in an easy to follow and easy to use manner. Sonas also wanted to update the website themselves, in particular adding in regular news items that were to be shown on the home page and also on the latest news page.
Some features coming soon to this website is the addition on an online donation form facility.
See the newly redesigned website at: http://www.sonashousing.ie