Thomas Pocklington Trust Engagement Websites
Engagement websites developed for Thomas Pocklington Trust and the Sight Loss Councils using the WordPress Content Management System
Raising Awareness Through Engagement
Thomas Pocklington Trust (TPT) champions the needs of blind and partially sighted people and develops services to increase independence and improve lives with a focus on education, employment and engagement.
It also funds ten Sight Loss Councils which, led by blind and partially sighted members, tackle local issues and work with businesses and service providers to improve the accessibility of their services.
TPT and its Sight Loss Councils needed new engagement website platforms to raise awareness and advance their vitally important work.
After a competitive process, we were delighted to be chosen as the new web development partner for these websites. The project was a perfect fit for our company ethos of delivering solutions for causes that promote wellbeing and inclusivity.
WordPress Expertise
We quickly struck up an excellent rapport with the TPT and Sight Loss Councils teams.
Of primary importance was the implementation of an intuitive and cost-effective Content Management System (CMS) to enable the charity’s web authors to easily update the websites.
WordPress was the natural choice for the project and, as a preferred supplier on local authority frameworks, we have extensive experience with the platform.
We started development by deploying and configuring WordPress on our resilient hosting infrastructure located in a UK Tier 3 datacentre.
PSBAR Accessibility
With the deployment in place we used our expertise to create flexible WordPress templates for efficient authoring processes and ease of management of website structure and content population.
For a website of this nature, a high level of accessibility is essential and we developed templates in line with the requirements of the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018 (WCAG 2.1 AA). We also ensured that we used very deliberate and descriptive wording wherever possible in the WordPress administration system to assist blind and partially sighted content authors.
Accessibility Testing
All Cyber Media projects are accompanied with a robust approach to website testing, including browser, device and accessibility audits against a documented test plan. The Thomas Pocklington Trust project was no exception in this regard, however it was also a privilege to be able to tap into the insight of the charity’s ‘real world’ accessibility experts to augment our standard approach.
To complete the project we undertook a comprehensive content migration exercise from the outgoing websites, inclusive of all imagery, news articles and documents.
The new websites are also supported by our WordPress maintenance packages to maximise security and resilience.
Project Outcomes
Thomas Pocklington Trust and its Sight Loss Councils now have accessible, easy to administer, and reliable web presences that aid their vital work supporting and representing blind and partially sighted people.
From Cyber Media’s perspective it was an enjoyable, inspiring and highly informative experience working with the charity and we look forward to developing our relationship with the organisation going forward.
We are really pleased with the functionality, look and feel of our sites. The team at Cyber listened and were responsive. We really liked that we had a warranty period after go-live that allowed us to pick up any snagging issues. They took the headache out of re-platforming two websites simultaneously.
Penny Wilkinson, Head of Communications at TPT