I worked with with Mymedia on branding and design as well as Connect Assist in incorporating the Rightnow CRM used to provide support services to higher education staff and faculty.

The backdrop to the relaunch is an education sector in crisis. Unprecedented funding cuts have led to job losses, increased workloads, financial worries and the complex stresses associated with working within an atmosphere of insecurity. The charity is dedicated to providing financial, emotional and practical support to higher education staff and is part of the Teacher Support Network group of charities.

Recourse.org.uk offers:

• Practical financial support including the awarding of grants to staff in financial trouble and expert practical advice from trained advisers

• Free confidential 24/7 Support Line staffed by experienced professional counsellors around the clock, every day of the year – 0808 802 03 04

• Online Support from an experienced coach with a wealth of experience in the education sector

• Online self assessment tools to help users focus on areas in their home and work life they may want to improve

The website was built on Wordpress CMS, using a unique theme that has W3C-valid CSS and XHTML, based on the rebranding concepts and html site mock-ups from Mymedia. The css and html templates were then ported into the Righnow CRM to create a seamless user experience across the different domain names.

Recourse is an attempt to raise awareness about the services the charity provides. The new website replaces one built four years ago as a simple blog on a Drupal platform. The new site adds accessibility functionality as well as a more vibrant, color scheme and a front page that keeps more services at the top of the page. The bond with UCU was also more prominently displayed.

In the design I pushed for a more colorful theme and a modular format. The charity is fast changing and reacting to what’s happening in the profession. A modular style better allows for quick addition of elements without throwing off the overall design of the site. In the design as well are more embedded visuals. This is because a lot of the content Recourse (and CUSN previously) includes doesn’t naturally lend itself to post images, and so the challenge was to keep the website visually appealing.

As part of the Committee to Protect Bloggers, I teamed up with Wordia.com to promote Blogging Nation Week, during which time we gathered different Web professionals to define words applying to online expression. The week was in part a tribute to the successful relaunch of the Committee to Protect Bloggers as well as highlight the ongoing challenges people face both by governments and business when trying to push online expression forward.

I took it offline for a crash redesign during the course of about a week in August and relaunched it with an expanded team and slightly augmented mission. As well as being an information site about bloggers being arrested and intimidated, we’re also focusing on legal issues, technology and tutorials aimed at keeping bloggers from behind bars and worse and partnering with more organisations working on digital rights.

The Committee has added more activists and reporters talking about issues in Iran, Vietnam and elsewhere. and we’re collaborating more with groups such as Global Voices. In the works now is also a collaborative project with developers to build a crowd-sourced platform for people to submit news on internet repression throughout the world.

Within a month of relaunch, the committee was featured in an episode of The Listening Post on Al Jazeera’s English news station and a Voice of America Vietnamese-language broadcast.

For the new site, I worked with web developer Nigel Parry and designer Ken Harper (Iron Clad Images), and you can read more about that here as well as at Nigel’s site. The judges said teachersupport.info “addresses a critical need. The site has a great architecture with interactive content served upfront. You can sense the passion behind this site, in spite of a modest budget. The judges admired the written entry submission which was passionate and clear and the great use of social networking tools.”

The relaunch ensured that our website became an even more useful and easy way for teachers to access our services. More details about the award are given at teachersupport.info.

(Photo: From left we have Hannah Essex, Head of Communications & Business Development; Julian Stanley, Chief Executive; Sally Baker, Client Experience Manager; and yours truly, Digital Media Manager)

I worked with web developer Nigel Parry and designer Ken Harper (Iron Clad Images) over the last spring and summer to develop a new look and better navigation flow for the site as well as a number of tools designed to increase the usability and accessability of the site. The result is years beyond the previous one. We moved off of Drupal and over to Interactive Tools’ Article Manager 2.

For more on this project, visit Nigel Parry’s website.

To see more about the creation of this site, visit the Article Manager forum thread here.

From the website:

“Practitioners from war zones who participate in our program become prepared to treat, and to train other practitioners to treat, trauma survivors in their home countries. We thereby seek to leverage our resources by creating a snowball effect that greatly increases the number of practitioners worldwide that fight torture.”

Handling the web technology for this group and consulting on tech issues with the many great people associated with it puts me pretty far off from the experiences that others on the advisory board have, as I sit safely behind a computer screen here in London. Other advisory board members, many of them practicioners themselves, are working in medical facilities, refugee camps and trauma treatment centers in Zimbabwe, the occupied Palestinian territories, Sri Lanka, Uganda and other places where people face first hand the human capacity for brutality and also for assistance in healing.