The Client
With 27 Members, the Conservatives in the European Parliament form the largest British political group in Europe.
The Need
In recent years there has been a growing knowledge of how European Union legislation is affecting Britain, which is why the Conservatives in the European Parliament needed their own website that would not only support the Conservative Party but also increase awareness of those critical issues raised by the European Union that would have a significant impact on the UK.
The previous website of the Conservatives in Europe was integrated with the Conservative Party’s website. This meant that the Conservative European Party was not always able to create the stand-out they wanted. Not only did the new website need to inform users of the current European Parliament news but, more importantly, it had to promote the campaigns that they are currently running. The new website had to be designed with three user groups in mind; Journalists, Conservative Party Members, and individual Constituents wanting to find out what their local Conservative MEP is actively engaged in.
Each aspect of the new site was designed to encourage responses from users to gain as much information as possible that would then help to collate views and feelings. All these items needed to be updatable by a custom-designed content management system that not only had to be user friendly but also practical for everyday use. The client did not want to discriminate against any user and this meant that accessibility and cross-browser compatibility was a high priority together with close adherence to current website legislation.
In the words of our client: ‘The site will be a media centre. It is the online arm of the Conservative media office. The aim is to promote the work of Conservative MEPs in newsworthy fields, supporting audio-visual feeds, documentation, reports, polls, surveys and petitions’
Peter Wilding
The Solution
For a project of this size and nature Urban Element assigned the client four members of staff to help take them through each aspect of the project lifecycle. The project divided into four main areas:
• Project Management (technical specification and project plan)
• Web Design (mock-ups, consultation, HTML template)
• System Design (WebControl, .Net programming)
• Testing and Launch
After several conversations and two client meetings, Urban Element created a technical specification for the client. This outlined the full feature list that was going to be available in the website and how a user would interact with each component.
Tim Jarvis (Lead Developer) took Peter Wilding (point of contact for the Conservatives in the European Parliament) through each part of the technical specification making sure that all components were understood and would work the way they expected them to.
Front End Web Design
Malcolm Maclean (Urban Element Creative Director) and Dave Johnston (Urban Element Graphic Designer) took them through the design phase. As with all our websites, the design is always unique and created around the client’s needs. Making sure we understand the client and what they want to achieve is a large part of this process. Many websites can fall short of the client’s expectations because the designers don’t take the necessary time to understand the client’s requirements.
The client requested a series of mock-ups based around three very different design ideas: a political website, a design that pushed boundaries, and a design which was contemporary.
Following the design consultation process and the provision of a series of design mock-ups, the client signed off the graphic template and work commenced on the HTML template.
Urban Element used standards-based techniques, so that the website by default was search engine friendly. From a technical perspective the site was designed using XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). The use of these standards-based practices ensured that the site was robust and forwards compatible working across most standards-based Internet Browsers.
Careful steps were taken to ensure the website was compliant with any applicable UK law including the Data Protection Act and the Disability and Discrimination Act.
By taking such care with the development and construction of the site, the Conservative European Party website is now:
• Extremely search engine friendly
• Accessible to people with visual and other impairment
• Cross browser compatible
• Future proof against changes in technology eg mobile devices
• More easily updateable
• Faster in terms of download times
System Design
Having written and agreed the technical specification, lead developer Tim Jarvis and his colleagues set about developing the two main parts of the system:
Front End Site Functionality
We incorporated innovative and sympathetic graphic design (front-end) with feature rich business logic (back-end). Specialising in the Microsoft .Net framework, the development team built a number of bespoke components including:
- Campaign micro sites
- Polls
- Surveys
- Petitions
- Media Gallery
- Resources
- And much more…
Each component was designed so that it could interact with other components. For example, News Articles can be associated with Campaigns putting relevant information in one place for the user.
Dynamic Content Management using ‘WebControl’
We built the client a content management system called WebControl. WebControl is a bespoke and powerful database-driven content management tool, which allows our client to update the database-related aspects of the website.
WebControl was provided as an extension to the website and is accessible online via a secure login area; this means that the client is able to update the website at any time – and from anywhere that has internet connection. This is especially important as the people adding information to the site have to split their time between Brussels, Strasbourg and London.
The client is now able to:
Create campaign micro sites
Manage items that appear on the home page and throughout the site
Upload current documents, images and videos as resources for News Articles and Campaigns
Export all data collected from users.
And much more …
Training
Once WebControl had been completed, making sure that it was intuitive and easy to use, Tim Jarvis and Jon Ellard (Urban Element Director) travelled to Brussels to carry out client training with four members of the Conservative team. Even on a system of this magnitude only one day of face-to-face training was required to bring the team up to speed.
This rapid training schedule was largely due to the detailed process we had gone through in creating WebControl and the ongoing support we are able to provide. The training session even finished early, allowing us more free time to have our photo taken outside the Parliamentary buildings!
The Results
The end result has been a website that allows its users to participate in polls, surveys, and petitions as well as posting comments. All these actions can be done in conjunction with a news story or a campaign.
Moreover, the website administrators have the ability to add in new publications written by MEPs, tell visitors about what MEPs have been engaged in recently through the ‘MEPs In The News’ section, create news and campaign items and associate any poll, survey, or resources with a specific news or campaign item.
Every aspect of the site was meticulously planned and carefully created by Urban Element. Every detail now reflects the requirements of the site’s target audiences, while adhering to the latest accessibility guidelines and Internet legislation. In the first week of the site going live 872 unique visitors visited the site.
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