Volunteers bring additional expertise to charity website

Client

St Mary Islington Community Partnership (SMICP) is a charity based at St Mary Islington church. They run a range of community activities including a youth club, a pre-school playgroup and hire rooms to local community organisations.

The challenge

Gill Hopkins is a volunteer member of staff at SMICP and uses her web design skills to maintain the organisation's website. She contacted iT4Communities because she needed support with a couple of website enhancements. SMICP needed to improve their results in search engines so the site could be found easily by users. They had problems with the layout of the webpages and they needed help with form mail activation. They also wished to produce a banner for their website homepage which needed to incorporate two existing sites - St Mary's Youth Club and St Mary's Pre-school.

Our help

A screenshot from the completed website

Two volunteers came forward, Nick Jones and Andrew Turner.

Nick Jones, an iT4Communities volunteer with eight years IT experience, worked on the technical website problems and spent two hours at St Mary Islington helping with meta tags, description and key tags and solved the layout problems. After some head scratching the form mail problem was also solved.

It soon became clear to Andrew Turner, a volunteer whose expertise is creative web design, that the home page needed a special banner. Once the banner had been produced the existing banners of the older site seemed inappropriate, so Andy generously designed two extra banners which unified the site. According to Gill, designing the banners took about five weeks and Andrew must have spent many hours designing them. Andy did four versions of each one before we decided on the final versions.

The results

• Website now listed by search engines.
• A professional looking site, fully functioning with a harmonised look.

What our client said

Nick Jones was delightful - very helpful and professional. I never met Andy Turner - everything was done electronically. He was most enthusiastic and nice to work with. I have warmly thanked the volunteers and so has the Chairman of the Trustees of the charity. I am delighted and pleased that I have been able to have this help to put the finishing touches to the site.

Gill Hopkins, St Mary Islington Community Partnership

28th January 2011