A community business forum
We have always felt passionate about getting involved in our local community. The people at the Sneinton Business Forum share our ideal and are promoting the development of an inclusive and sustainable business community to help regenerate our neighbourhood of Sneinton, in Nottingham. We designed for them an accessible and flexible website that has become an essential platform for their action in the community.
The Sneinton Business Forum team was very enthusiastic to discuss their core values and ethos with us. We reviewed and compiled the various materials they had already produced (brochures, meeting minutes and press releases), together with drafting a graphical identity that would reflect these values. Combining all this information into a coherent structure, we started to create a website easy to navigate and attractive to both the local community users and potential new business partners.
We quickly realised how dynamic the SBF team was and it became obvious that the website should reflect this burst of activity. To allow the whole team to participate in the making of the website and its future evolution, we developed the website around an open-source content management system, that we set up and tailored to allow the whole team to contribute to the content of the website.
By crafting neat and flexible templates, the team was able to change the content of the website pages, post business news and advertise for events without ever having to worry about formatting and dealing with complex coding. We also plugged in some additional functions to the website to help Forum communicate with its community such as contact forms, mailing lists and photo galleries. And to make sure that the interaction was transparent to all the members of the forum, we even gave them at our offices a two hours hands-on tutorial to use their new toy!
After a few months of frantic activity on the website, the Sneinton Business Forum came back to us with ideas of a local business directory, to encourage local people to use Sneinton businesses and to provide local entrepreneurs with an affordable way to advertise for their services and skills. So we customised another open-source database application, so that this online business directory could integrate seamlessly with the original website. Behind the stage, the SBF team could now administer their database using simple accessible web tools, renewing business subscriptions or add new businesses to the database in just a few clicks.
- Categories
- Web design &
Urban regeneration - Client
- Sneinton Business Forum
- Location
- Nottingham, UK
- Progress
- Launched, March 2008
- Link
- The Sneinton Business Forum
