Health and Care Learning Wales, Tech Refresh

Health and Care Learning Wales are the sole provider of fundable Health and Social Care and Childcare qualifications across Wales. They needed a technical refresh of the underlaying technology on their website as this software was reaching its end-of-life support with Umbraco.

As well as needing to upgrade their underlying technology, we learnt from organising user experience workshops with content editors and core stakeholders, that we’d be able to implement workflow improvements that would streamline their experience when content editing and carrying out website maintenance.

THE SERVICES WE PROVIDED

Application Development

User Experience

Digital Services Delivery

CHALLENGES

Upgrade Umbraco 7 to 10, whilst optimising existing code and implementing new patterns to improve efficiency and workflows.
New site to be a visual replica of the client’s existing site design.
Tackle a cumbersome content tree. The previous design meant content nodes had been created to display media nodes on a one-to-one basis, essentially doubling the amount of maintainable content.
Increase the ability for the client to carry out in-house website management and maintenance to reduce the need for external support.

TECHNOLOGY

THE SOLUTION

Added metadata to the media items as well as adding content finders to dynamically render media items as content to reduce content tree nodes.
Utilised Azure web apps, blob storage and Azure SQL to ensure a coherent resource infrastructure with high availability and streamlined code change releases to all environments.
Website maintenance features such as the ability for the client team to add their own JavaScript snippets and edit various SEO properties for all pages.
Easily accessible user documentation for content editors.

OUTCOMES AND BENEFITS

Technology refreshed and secure under manufacturer support.
Content and resources are easier to find for content editors.
Content editors no longer need to manually link media resources to content nodes, essentially giving them a single source of truth for dealing with meta data and their resources.
Virtually removed the need for first line support calls due to back-office documentation and collaborative testing during development.