Affinity New Media, web design and database development specialists in Norwich won the competitive pitch to develop a key site for the Learning Skills Council, a government backed body that operates under the initiative to draw together all training, vacancies and employment bodies in the wider community under one authority and to provide planning and funding for high quality vocational education and training for both young people and adults.
The site was designed to strict government accessibility guidelines and had to have a very complex content management system powering the back end which allowed key users to promote vacancies to regional audiences, manage the organisation’s special events and strategic conferences, populate, organize and update news areas and to crucially fully administer staff and administration users as staff move between regions.
As well as handling all of these critical applications, the content management system, powered by the Affinity Media Assistant, also provided modules to allow online group mailings to tutors, employers, key agencies and learning providers. These modules also provide statistical feedback on the success of these mailings in terms of sign-ups, referrals etc. By developing the Affinity Media Assistant to handle this application, it meant that very complex online e-shots with feedback could be performed by clients within a user friendly, non technical environment.
The main site also has the Home Page as fully content managed so that the dynamism of the organization is mirrored online. Affinity configured the site to provide extremely detailed site statistics and provide facilities for both upload and download options for registered users.
A further unique feature of the site is the online brokerage section which Affinity developed to allow Learning Skills Brokers to interview business owners and assess their requirements. All of this information is collated and stored in an online database and analysed with the site able to produce representation of the results in the form of graphs and pie charts.
