Camden Net community project

www.camdennet.org

As part of its e-Services initiatives, Camden Council has developed a set of useful Internet tools to serve the local community. This project is called CamdenNet.

CamdenNet has been built as part of the Camden Community Strategy's aim to support the work of communities in Camden. It has been designed to support the work of existing community groups by providing an online computer presence. This will allowlocal users to promote and inform people about their groups, carry out surveys, have discussions, notify members of the group about events or meetings and much more.

As online consultants, our part in this was to develop the brand and style of the product, assist with the information architecture and construct the page and content style and structure. We paid particular attention to creating a design that conformed to the Borough's high expectations in terms of usability and accessibility. We created a unique identity that is clearly associated with the main Camden 'brand' and simple rules for linking and signposting content to ensure it was easy to find and easy to understand.

The project was successfully launched into the community to high praise. We also designed and produced posters and brochures to advertise and market the launch.

Key skills for this project:
— Branding
— Structural design
— Information architecture
— Visual design
— Graphic design and print services

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Camden Micro Business Gateway

Camden Council E-Services department are developing an online information service for small businesses. It is aimed specifically at businesses in the Borough and contains particularly relevant and detailed information on local sources and providers of help and advice.

This website is designed to give straightforward information on how to set up in business, where to go for advice and training and how to stay within the law.

The design brief was to deliver a user experience that is clean, clear, business-like but also informal and friendly. We created a simple set of design rules for navigation and offered consultancy on the Information architecture and logical structure. Due to the multicultural blend of businesses in the community we designed a three-dimensional multi-lingual structure where the user may switch between languages at any point on the site.

We delivered a visual model for usability testing and finally clean HTML templates for all unique pages for XML conversion.

Key skills for this project
— Branding
— Structural design
— Information architecture
— Visual design
— XHTML-compliant templates
— Usability testing

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London Borough of Camden Intranet

The Borough embarked on a major redesign of its widely used internal Intranet network. The network spans the entire structure of the council and offers individual portals for each of the departments and all of their sub-sections.

Our job was to totally redesign the look-and-feel, provide consultancy on the information architecture, produce designs for every unique page and then provide the internal technical team with clean XHTML-compliant working HTML templates.

We provided alternative models for usability and preference testing then developed hundreds of unique pages for the chosen design, including a dynamic universal javascript menu system.

The site design also needed to comply with RNIB guidelines for visually impaired and colourblind users.

Key skills for this project
— Branding
— Structural design
— Information architecture
— Visual design
— XHTML-compliant templates
— Usability testing

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