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 view proposals, submit feedback, contact the teams with any questions or concerns, and involves putting any consultation and planning documentation online in a way that is publicly accessible and transparent. It’s a good medium to see exactly what the timelines of the project are and to track its progress, from development through to construction and operation, depending on the interests of the affected community at each stage.
Part of this involves a dedicated website for RES’ unique Local Electricity Discount Scheme (LEDS), which enables nearest community members to apply for an annual electricity discount on participating projects, once operational.

The issue

LEDS was first launched in 2013, and as such, the CMS had been running for over 10 years, and was 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, due to issues with adding meta tags after the site being moved to a new server by IT. There were also problems uploading documents on the front end which was taking up valuable time for the team.

Another roadblock was that when searching RES LEDS on search engines, it mostly gave listings for Red LEDs, which wasn’t ideal.

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

The first win was to have the site visible on google, so I added the link on participating project sites so that they would be able to be found on search engines. This would also help ranking when the site was able to accept SEO keywords and descriptions. This was able to be done before the new site was being planned. The next win was a second site with a three second delayed redirect that enabled analytics of site visits. This wasn’t the most elegant solution but it allowed the site to be found online, and was one of the only available options at that moment.

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. Projects now became child items in this element, and the projects could now be organised into regions instead of being in a single, long list. This was then integrated into a shiny new site ranking properly on Google, which can be found here.

When searching for RES LEDS, the site is currently at the top of the search listings on google, the second listing being the original site that I’d added the link to at the beginning.