LEDS

When I first started at RES, part of my role was to create new project sites for internal clients. These sites are created for the public to ask questions, raise objections or concerns, see the progress of construction and put any legal documentation online in a way that is publicy accessible and transparent. It’s a good medium to see exactly what the timelines are, and how this affects a community.

Part of this involves a scheme called the Local Energy Development Scheme (LEDS), which allows community members to apply for an electricity discount in participating areas.

The issue

The CMS had been running for over 10 years, and on its last legs. The team had taken this over as a legacy project, and were becoming increasingly frustrated with the issues that it had. The amount of participating projects were becoming unmanageable and it wasn’t showing on search engines. They were also having issues with the frontend when uploading documents which was taking up valuable time for the team.

The brief

The team wanted a new website as the old one was starting to show too many signs of wear. The scope was to build a new backend system with a user friendly UI, integrated into a new management system via an API. New projects were to be added and managed efficiently.

This needed to rank on search engines, with good SEO and forms with conditional elements to help the user to upload documentation or send this via post depending on their level of skill or computer setup.

The Solution

My instance of umbraco already had a multi language in place, so I started with an empty umbraco site and trimmed down the existing pages, removing out of date content and creating a more concise navigation.

I started with an empty umbraco site and trimmed down the existing pages, removing out of date content and creating a navigation that was more concise. The LEDS team took this and fed back, rewriting content and I took the structure and advised on how to streamline forms so that there wouldn’t be as many needed for the various sections.

An element was created to allow a database lookup for new projects to be verified within Umbraco itself using the project code given to customers. Proojects now became child items in the element, and the projects could now be organised into regions instead of being in a single list.

IT was integrated into a shiny new site ranking properly on Google.

The site can be found here.