Lyttelton Information Centre

The Lyttelton Information Centre had an existing site to help locals and visitors discover businesses, activities and events in the local area. The site had been built in the wake of the 2011 earthquakes and was starting to suffer from two main problems:

• The data entry was unstructured and gave volunteer maintainers too much freedom in layout to deliver a coherent and clean site, making it hard for end users to find the content they needed amongst the clutter
  
   
• The focus of the Info Centre had changed from providing a key source of information & assistance to locals recovering from a series of earthquakes to being targetted at the tourist visitor looking for the best of our local activities, accommodation & businesses

When working with a volunteer run group it is essential to keep the user interface as clear and simple as possible. Volunteer site editors need to be able to log in and maintain the site with almost zero training - any fear or confusion will stop the site being maintained and it will quickly become dated and miss it's purpose.

To meet this aim we had a couple of key targets:

• Keep the options available to editors to as few as possible while letting them get their job done. Within this we needed to provide end users with a standardised site with reliable page layouts. We managed to get the site into just two content types
  • a listing type that covers all businesses, events and activities - this is the one that volunteer editors will use 99.99% of the time
  • a general page type that allows the editor a bit more freedom to add various panels of carousels, columned content and data from other pages. This will be used very rarely by the volunteers and really only existed to make an alternative layout for the home & contact pages
    
     
• Keep the data as structured as we can so that as and when the site is migrated again it can be done with minimal effort. This also helps provide a very structured set of entry fields for volunteers, giving them the certainty that they have all of the data they need for a given listing and confident that it will be displayed correctly on the final page they produce.

Both BlueFusion and the Lyttelton Info Centre are very happy with the outcome, and we look forward to seeing them promoting the local area and updating the site.

We know we were successful in making the site information easy to find & read as the volunteers almost instantly started getting requests from local businesses to change their outdated information that we had unknowingly migrated from the old site.