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.

StaffWise is designed to help Scottish local authorities and schools develop policy and arrange stress risk assessments It provides resources for managers to adopt a ‘whole staff’ approach towards wellbeing in their schools or centres, using a step-by-step review and simple action planning process.

StaffWise’s practical resources, developed in conjunction with Fife and North Lanarkshire councils, include an organisational audit, guides and policy information, which promote good management practice and effective ways of working. The content and format can help Scottish employers and managers fulfil the requirements of the Health and Safety Executive Stress Management Standards with confidence and ease.

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 built the site in Wordpress, and based its design on the theme The Unstandard Remix 1.0 by Jon Gos and Derek Punsalan and The Unstandard by Derek Punsalan for 5thirtyone. It also employs a few plugins, including Customize Your Community, Live Comment Preview, Multi-page Toolkit, ShareThis and WP-Polls.

The comments section was edited to promote users to supply additional advice or suggestions of content to add in an attempt to take advantage of the Web as a setting for living documents.

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.

The Minibar is a popular regular meetup in Shoreditch for internet professionals to network and swap ideas and offers monthly face time to people more prone to staring at screens. If you’ve got a marketable idea this is the place to find people with the skills to make it possible, with upwards of around 150 web developers, programmers, designers, etc., from around the city attending at a single go.

The other is the Google London Open Source Jam.These are theme-driven nights at Google’s London HQ at Belgrave House. Marvel at the working environment that keeps people in the office 12 hours or more a day, the open kitchen area and hear ideas that could well be the future of open source and possibly the web itself.

To me this one is pure brain candy. I dig the 7-minute open-to-all presentation period where people trot out what they’re working on in rapid-fire sessions and then face an onslought of suggestsions, questions and critiques in a sort of Dragons Den for smart people.

Cannot say that a good amount isn’t flying well over my php/mysql head at times, but the end result is a clear idea of what’s out there and what’s to come in the coming years.

Website builder sought for Great Teachers Remembered

Overview

Teacher Support Network seeks a builder for a website to be located at greatteachers.org.uk, which will be a companion to its main site at teachersupport.info. Design and content have already been assembled and we are looking for a quick, independent and solid website builder to bring it online on deadline and to design specification.

About us

Teacher Support Network consists of a group of independent charities and a social enterprise in the United Kingdom that provide practical and emotional support to staff in the education sector and their families. You can find out more about us at teachersupport.info.

Background

Great teachers remembered is a web based product to help remember and celebrate the lives and careers of teachers who have died. The site allows colleagues, friends and relatives to post a tribute to remember a great teacher. Others that knew the teacher can also visit the site and add messages and photos. This will serve as a fundraising tool as a donation is required to post a tribute or to add a comment or photograph. The site also is intended to be opportunity to raise awareness of Teacher Support Network and information on the charity will be included in the site. We also believe that the site is important to furthering Teacher Support Network’s aim in promoting the importance of teachers in society.

Our needs

You should be proficient in php, java, creating clean, clear css and be familiar with methods of semantic markup and MySQL database structure. You should have experience in creating sites with heavy interactivity and user-generated content, creating custom forms and integrating secure payment methods that will operate through WordPay (www.worldpay.com). The site should contain RSS feeds, search engine-friendly tagging

Your build must be able to run on either Windows or Linux servers. You should be familiar with W3C Web Standards and comfortable in creating websites that comply fully with Web Standards requirements as well as UK’s disability requirements. Proprietary systems will be considered, but you must work within the scope of the budget. Open source solutions are encouraged.

In your RFP (request for Proposal), please include:

1. Information about your company or yourself (if an individual)

2. Examples of websites you’ve built that are still in use today (those that include interaction similar to this project’s are preferred)

3. References and testimonials

4. A list of tools you most often use to build: platforms, CMS systems, code language, etc. and what you envision using to build this site.

5. An outline of your working process.

6. Copy of personal resume or company literature

7. A copy of your work guarantee

Candidates who submit these materials will receive a pdf of the site design. Please contact andrew.lyons@teachersupport.info with your application packet. PDF attachments preferred.