We were asked to build the structure for the website, ensure it was content managed and to overcome their main concern for checking the numerous hyperlinks which was an important part of their site's use. The Institute also needed a means of gaining useful feedback on the site's effectiveness to complete their research.

Ensuring the design was kept clear and unobtrusive was essential as the focus was very much on ease of access and ability to find information quickly in a time pressured environment. The architecture needed to take this into consideration with an optimal number of clicks to reach the desired goal. The questionnaire was designed to be as simple to complete as possible using drop downs and radio buttons. We also wrote a routine for automatically checking the live status of hyperlinks to external sites. This can be run on a schedule or an as and when needed basis and administrators are emailed reports of the results.

The website access has been rolled out across the region and initial responses have been very welcoming with high participation rates. User comments have praised the website for its ease of use and even the login which is in place to protect the internal pages has not proved to be a barrier to usage. The questionnaire is fired off to the administrator who collates the information and we hope that the research department will gain some valuable feedback over the next 12 months.