Tune in to Sean Brokenshire (FOTV Website designer, developer and strategist) talking about the approach to building your P&C website!

Video Transcript

When I heard about the innovative approach to learning that Lindfield Learning Village had adopted I was really intrigued, and when I heard from the President of Friends Of The Village about talking digital strategy and developing a digital platform for their parents and members, I really wanted to get involved.

So I’ve been working in digital marketing and website development for almost 17 years now, but I’m not so much interested in the nuts and bolts of website development but more looking at a holistic overarching view of how a website fits within an organisation’s brand and marketing strategy so that it’s not just an information hub, not just an intranet, but also ties in with a brand’s values and represents that organisation to the world.

The approach we took to this project was to use Human-Centred Design principles and that basically means balancing the human desires, wants, and requirements of the project against the technology and business feasibility and viability factors, and when you find that sweet spot, that balance between those factors, you’re more likely to gain acceptance amongst users and for it to be a long-term successful project.

The methodology we used was Design Thinking and that fits really neatly within Human-Centred Design principles. The main tenet of Design Thinking is to start with empathy – that means listening to your stakeholders and discovering and defining what their needs and wants are. That means mapping-out your audience and we started with that – we created an audience map of all of the different stakeholders and users that were interested in this digital platform and then mapped out their needs and wants individually, and then thought about how we could meet those needs.

Going through that process enabled us to create an Information Architecture. That informs the website navigation structure – where content should be placed on a website, including on the home page, what things should be a priority for that placement and what things could be better placed elsewhere.

Friends Of The Village needed its own brand identity, distinct from Lindfield Learning Village’s main brand but also tied-in. So we took the opportunity to design a new logo and borrow some graphic elements from the main Lindfield logo and the colour palette, but we decided to go with a more muted colour palette – using the purples, the greens, the oranges and the yellows, but toning that down so that it referenced the main brand but was its own identity as well.

Another priority of the website was to encourage parents and members to want to get involved with fundraising and volunteering opportunities. We’ve pulled out some stories from other parents that have volunteered or fundraised with the P&C before just to inspire others to want to do the same.

Thank you to everyone that got involved and I hope you like it. You can log-on now to FOTV.org.au