Uniting the Commissioner’s three key service areas into a single website
The Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, has powers to help and support children across the country. Her role is crucial, sitting at the heart of Government, delivering for children and championing their voices and needs.
Following a recent rebrand and newly published business plan, the Children’s Commissioner was looking to replace the existing website and bring in two other sites – her ‘Help at Hand’ support service and ‘In My Opinion (IMO)’ site for young people in care – into one website.
Our team was really excited to have been successful in the tender process and have the opportunity to work with The Children’s Commissioner. We began the project with a meeting to discuss the requirements and challenges of bringing three websites into one.
It was vital that we didn’t lose the separate identities of each brand whilst ensuring that the end user wouldn’t get ‘lost’ navigating through the website.
With so much great content and a wide range of end users, the website needed to be easy to use and accessible to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) AA standard. Led by our designer Jonny, we carried out a design and UX process to understand the target market for each website, presenting designs on both desktop and mobile.
During development, we worked closely with the team at the Department for Education (DfE), the sponsor organisation for the Children’s Commissioner, to ensure that the website performed well on the selected architecture and met the stringent security requirements set by DfE.
Our development and devops team worked incredibly hard to learn an unfamiliar cloud environment with some very enjoyable and fruitful technical discussions between all parties. It was an absolute pleasure working with the DfE and Children’s Commissioner teams to deliver a technical solution in a positive and collaborative manner.
Katie, Jonny and the team were consistently good natured and knowledgeable, even when presented with lots of different opinions from our team! The aim of the project was to create something fresh that allowed the Children’s Commissioner and our team to define ourselves and build on the foundations set by our survey of half a million children, The Big Ask.
Having this feature so prominently on the site helps to bring all of our work together neatly and gives the site so much more personality. It’s colourful, personal and unites the three parts of the Commissioner’s important service in one place really nicely.
Amy Taylor | Head of Communications
Aligning teams across three organisations meant that we had regular meetings through-out the project to keep on top of all the moving parts. Following a very detailed launch plan, we successfully launched the website in March 2023.
We’re really proud to have been part of such a fantastic project and we’ve all been inspired by the amazing work of The Children’s Commissioner. We continue to support and maintain the website and we’re looking forward to working with the team on more projects in future.