I pushed the new Barnsley Hospital website live on Friday (Jan 6th). This event is what I’ve described as a ‘soft’ launch as the site by no means matches the original project specifications but it is clearly a LOT better than the previous version which was launched back in 2008.
Your feedback
Work is currently ongoing to improve site content and clear up any technical hitches that slipped though testing but I urge anyone of a critical denomination to visit the site and send feedback using the new Found a problem? form:
New key features
- Cleaner more accessible design
- Improved navigation, especially in the large footer area
- Complete structural overhaul/refresh which concentrates on key areas such as patient info and visitor info
- Improved search system (uses Relevanssi)
- Updated contact us page which includes a new in-depth online form
- Integration with twitter/facebook on news posts
- User comments/feedback on news posts
- Improved photography used throughout the site
- Feedback/report a problem form integrated into every page (see above)
Technical stuff
- Latest version of WordPress+MultiSite
- Uses latest HTML5/CSS3 standards (using Modernizr for legacy browsers)
- Integrated Google Fonts (Merriweather) for increased compatibility
- Progressively enhanced with less-capable browsers (IE6/7/8, FF3) fed a modified layouts (a good example of this is the homepage animated banner which is ‘static’ in IE6)
Stick with us
Being a very small team with only one web designer/developer (me) significantly working on the project meant that certain aspects of the site development had to be delayed. This is by no means a negative thing. New features being added to the site is great PR and we have plenty of these in the pipeline.
The key point here is this isn’t the end of the development cycle, its the beginning. The site will grow exponentially in the next 12 months now that a clear strategy has been outlined.
Real artists ship
If we were to wait until every-single-cool-new-feature was added and every-single-piece-of-content was updated the site would never (trust me, never) have made it to launch.
Our aim is simple, to make the Barnsley Hospital website the best NHS Trust website in the country and to do this using internal resources, open-sourced tools and collaboration with our 2000+ members of staff.
After all the site is as much their site as it is ours.
Things that were delayed (techy + non-techy)
Finally, for the ones who care, here are a few back-burner items we are working on:
- Responsive design (more on this decision later)
- Updated Accessibility functions to the very-basic ones we have now
- Full/proper WordPress MultiSite expansion (see previous post)
- Unique design for each ‘top-level section’ (see Patient Info for example)
- Services content re-fresh (a lot of our services pages are still out-of-date and need some serious TLC)
- ‘Proper’ NHS Choices and Patient Opinion integration (via RSS/XML feeds, although both sites are mentioned in our feedback section)
- Better contact info for the media team (this page is a compromise until we get our act together)
- An advanced members section allowing online application and a secure log-in area for discussion and information sharing
- … there are a few more but less important… check back later for more insight…
