Notting Hill: Website and CMS

More and more people find that editing online content is now a part of their day job. So when we set about creating a new website at the heart of Notting Hill's digital business, we made sure the user experience for business users was just as good as public site users.

Introduction

Having already carried out extensive user research with customers and staff we had a clear picture of what the business needed, and what it's online communities wanted. The new website was a significant financial investment of NHHG and it had to deliver on a number of fronts.

We were tasked to create a future proofed, highly user friendly solution that put control of the site in the hands of business users and created an exceptional user experience for customers.

Objectives

• User centred
  
• Usable, accessible and standards compliant
• Enable dispersed content creation/editing
• Optimised page structure for SEO
• Able to display rich media
• Support the selling of homes

Methodology

Practicing an iterative, user centred design process, we carried out a number of collaborative workshops with business users and tenants, testing information architecture, wireframe concepts and interactive prototypes.

In such a large and complex organisation serving customers with very diverse needs, requirements are bound to change along the way. Our flexible process was able to accommodate the changing demands so that each business area got the most out of the investment.

Once we established the core page templates we built a staging site on our own CMS that enabled NHHG editors to populate the new pages with content ahead of completion.

Outcomes

The site went live in Spring 2011 and is enjoying increased use and positive feedback. Ok, there was one negative email from a customer but that's almost none! We understand the rather nifty postcode finder is proving particularly useful.

Update 2014

During April 2014 we launched an update to the website. Read more about it here.