NHS Resolution is the new identity for the old NHS Litigation Authority, and it now fully incorporates the National Clinical Assessment Service, the Family Health Services Appeal Unit and the Safety and Learning Service too. When they developed their new brand they had a small WordPress website developed to act as a brochure – showcasing their new identity and serving as a holding site whilst they gained an understanding of what requirements they had for a fully functioning website that would service the needs of all four outfits that were now one organisation.
NHS Resolution approached Little Bird for support and maintenance of their WordPress website. Later, we were tasked with building a new WordPress website that would support the aims and business needs of the new organisation.
Little Bird Web Service’s work on this project made it the success it is. Their ability to understand and interpret client briefs and work with clients on their level in unfamiliar industries is impressive. The knowledge and expertise they are able to provide on WordPress alongside a logical and process-driven approach is what makes Little Bird excellent to work with and ultimately results in pieces of work that hit the mark.
KO, Digital communications manager – NHS Resolution
The project challenges
This project involved amalgamating the content and purpose of the old NHS Litigation Authority, the National Clinical Assessment Service, the Family Health Services Appeal Unit and the Safety and Learning Service websites into one new site, under the fresh identity of NHS Resolution. There were many years’ worth of content on these sites that all needed to be audited and have decisions made about whether to archive it or migrate it to the new site.
The existing WordPress website had been built to showcase the new identity and only supported pages as a content type. The design of the site, whilst great for pages of static information, was not conducive to being extended to incorporate other types of content.
We needed to develop a WordPress site that would hold many different types of content, have custom meta data and taxonomies that could be cross referenced, filtered and sorted. The site needed to be accessible and easy for users to navigate, even though the site had a structure that was many levels deep. Even after content review we still needed to be able to create a navigation system that allowed users to access the lower levels of content without them ending up in navigational dead ends.
What we did
We developed a new website for NHS Resolution. This project involved amalgamating the content and purpose of the old NHS Litigation Authority, the National Clinical Assessment Service, the Family Health Services Appeal Unit and the Safety and Learning Service websites into one new site, under the fresh identity of NHS Resolution.
- Consultancy and discovery
- Support and maintenance
- WAI AA accessible
- Bespoke WordPress theme
- Custom built functionality for WordPress plugin
How we did it
We started the website build project with a Discovery day. During this day we helped the client formally establish their needs for this website. We discussed the content that they would be migrating, suggested structures for the data, helped the client decide on a content migration policy and built a requirements list for the functionality of the new site. The resulting Requirements Document formed the basis for the work we did on this project.
We designed a navigation system that allows users to “drill down” into content multiple levels deep without losing their way. We created a mobile version of the navigation and desktop version. The desktop navigation system acts like breadcrumbs showing users where they have been and limits their options on where they can go in a linear fashion. This stopped site section navigation from becoming cluttered with too many options for the user to easily view and deal with.
One of the most important parts of the site was a Resource library. Official Resources come in many different formats, and needed to be searchable, and sorted by multiple categories. This was identified by the client as an area in which they wanted to have a structure that they could build upon as more Resources were published and became available. The Resource pages support multiple layouts depending on the format of the Resource and the main Resource archive uses a custom search engine and advanced filtering functionality to help site users find the Resources that they need.
We made good use of carefully selected third-party plugins saving considerable development time and adding highly useful functionality.
We extended WordPress’ default user role and capabilities to include new bespoke author and editor roles and permissions so that individual departments could manage their own content within the main site.
The results
Our need for a modern but corporate, user-friendly website that could bring complex services together under one brand was met and surpassed. Not only has it received high praise from stakeholders internally, but also externally. It has also been a joy to populate for the team that work on it daily and has resulted in significant improvements around our own processes and efficiency.
KO, Digital communications manager – NHS Resolution
We built a highly functional WordPress website that enabled our client to amalgamate the website content and requirements of the four previously separate outfits into one place and system. The site has a simple design that reflects the brand identity and vales of NHS Resolution. The site is highly usable both for the content editors and for the site users. Our modular design system sets the site up for easy extension in the future, which should increase the life cycle of the site.
Our collaborative and inclusive team working ensured good communication throughout the project. We had regular contact with the client during the build phase of the project, building good working relationships, that enabled collaboration between the client, the front-end design and the back-end development teams from the initial consultation stage to project delivery.