ABOUT

The brief:
Off the Record Croydon are an established charity offering counselling and advice to young people in Croydon and Sutton. ‘SkyLine’ is a new OTR programme offering online counselling via synchronous chat and asynchronous private messaging.

For this, we needed to produce responsive website that fitted OTR’s functional requirements and the branding of their existing website; while working as far as possible without our default framework to keep bespoke development costs to a minimum.

The work:

I was involved from day one of the project. My work included:
Liaising directly with the client to finalise the site content and talk through the more complicated aspects of the functionality.
Writing a detailed functional specification
Producing wireframes for the main site templates (see figs.7-8)
Producing wireframes for a complex registration form, which will allow users to sign up online to OTR’s face-to-face services as well as SkyLine.

The majority of new features introduced for OTR will be fed back into the BB Group’s own programme websites. The most significant of these is a one-click function allowing counsellors to generate session feedback forms after completing a counselling session via private message.

Following handover of the wireframes, I worked very closely with the graphic designer to finalise the design.
Initial client feedback was positive, but it was felt that there were too many buttons in the header. Our job was therefore principally to pare the options down to the most essential items. These changes also helped to differentiate the site’s appearance from our standard framework templates with minimal code changes.

The website is now in development and due to launch Summer 2013, with a second phase of development beginning six months after launch.