Neville Lodge is a residential care home that provides support for men and women with autism. This new service needs to communicate its values and aims to potential commissioners, service users and carers. As Neville Lodge is a new service, it is keen to establish itself in the care industry. The website would need to attract new service users and attract new talent. I would need to create a referral form and career section to catch information for potential service users. As content is nonexistent, I will need to design for any situation. I began by defining what Neville Lodge needed to communicate. I set out a few questions I'd need to answer to easily communicate the aims of Neville Lodge.
I followed a process by first conducting research. Looking at how other service providers display information. From sketches into fidelity prototypes, I gradually created the first version of the website design and begun development. As this was my first website build I was assisted by my line manager, who helped with the process from coming from visual studio to WordPress and suggesting we use a Bootstrap framework.
I had to ensure I develop a website that displays all of the services offered by Neville Lodge and make the referral process easy to complete. I wanted to make sure the "Make A Referral" process was easy enough for users to complete. I want to use a section/lego brick design to future proof any issues that might arise.
"Make An Enquiry" is a clear call to action on the Priory Adult Care website. That button takes the user to a form for commissioners/support workers to enquire about referrals. They have also optimised the page to improve SEO, by mentioning the combinations of enquiry and enquires 11 times.
Cygnet's career page tells a narrative of how they not only support service users but their people as well. Displaying progression, the support provided and how you can make a difference. The vacancies section has a fixed position job alert that would be very useful to collect contact details for potential applicants.
Based on the design goals, I created an information architecture. I found two outstanding design problems waiting for me to tackle. Firstly, both "Make A Referral" and "Careers" will need to be designed and applied to plugins or built-in code.
Based on the above problems identified, I started sketching some of the core components. I see what kind of framework I could use to make the build process simple.
I started work on building a base in HTML & CSS within Visual Studio and tested out some interactions and Navigations in codepen. Codepen allowed me to explore some ideas without having to create new builds.
This being my first website build, I ran into an issue with responsive screens. I tried many solutions from Media Queries to CSS Grid but it was my manager's suggestion of using Bootstrap and then guided me on implementing the framework.
I took the information gathered from the survey and interviews to create range of user personas. Throughout the project I needed to keep these users in mind.
