CITA Website Design Project

This project closed in March 2008. We thank all those groups who took part.

CITA has secured a limited amount of additional funding to offer these websites at a discounted rate to the VCS. If you are interesed please contact us by clicking on CONTACT US above.

Click here for a news item covering the project.

The participating groups were;

Regional Refugee Forum
Tous Ensemble
CORE
FROG
North East Cameroon Assoc
Scotswood Garden
NERS
Wearside Women in Need
Konnekt NE
Newcastle Council of Faiths
Disability North
Action Station
Herbees
Muslim Welfare House
SilxTeen Bar
St John's Early Years Pre-school
Lawnmowers Theatre Co
Across Communities
Young Asian Voices
Skills 4 U NE

Some of the websites are still being developed and as they are completed links to them will appear in the portfolio section of this site.

Project Funding and Selection Criteria

This project was funded by One North East from the Third Sector Capacity Fund and was aimed at organisations that are active in "Economic Inclusion". The project was open to any not for profit group, registered charity or "social enterprise" in the North East region that satisfied the "Economic Inclusion" criteria listed below.

As a part of this project CITA has produced a document that aims to be a simple guide to setting up a website for third sector organisations.

CITA engaged with 20 Groups to help the sector to drevelop best practice in website design and to develop a package.

The definition of “Economic Inclusion” that One North East use is;

Removing barriers that stop people from participating fully in economic activity.

Improving access to employment for people without work.

Raising economic participation in deprived communities.

Promoting equality and diversity.

Website Project Outline

CITA made use of Open Source systems to provide groups with the latest technology that enables them to manage and update their websites quickly and easily without the need for expert knowledge of complicated software and processes – simply “click and go” to update and add images to a website.

The system retains maximum flexibility with an ease of use at the lowest possible price. As a part of the package CITA offers full training, support in migrating an existing site (or help to set up a new site) and the provision of a system that is fully and easily configurable to suit individual needs. There is a choice of potentially thousands of skins (look and feel) for a website to choose from.

Iindividualised design was charged at competitive rates.

A commercial Content Managed website could cost in excess of £2500. The cost of this system could be as little as that of a new hosting package or a DNS transfer, depending on the system chosen and current arrangements (there may be subscription costs in the second and subsequent years for some of the services depending on the choice of system).

Take control of your website – allow you and your staff to have the knowledge and the ability.

Website Whats

What was used?
Joomla for the content management engine

What did CITA provide?

• Assistance on “speccing up” the website (what it needed to do)
• A choice of look and feel (skins)
• The website set up with accessibility options
• And full training on how to update and manage the site

What did you need to do:
provide the content, the staff and the time for the process.

What could you get?
Contact us forms, forum, Blog, accessibility, file management, secure log ins, polls, User management

Content Managed Websites

What is “Content Managed”

“Content Managed” (CM) refers to the way in which your pages, the text and images within them are stored within your website system.

Older websites have individual pages made up of individual code (HTML) that is often difficult to change without expert knowledge.

A CM system holds the look and feel (Skin) as a kind of template (Cascading Style Sheet - CSS) and adds new text and images (content) through a database. You, through the database, govern where and how the content is displayed, you manage the content and hence what each individual page displays. Variations on the look and feel, the content and the navigation are all fully configurable within the database.

Some systems allow people to have layered access to manage their parts of the website.

It sounds complicated but is in fact very straight forward, full training is provided.