Colourful website creates good first impression

Client

Thames Valley Partnership (TVP) is based in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. TVP brings people and organisations together to create safe and stronger communities. They work in partnership with the criminal justice sector, local authorities, voluntary and community organisations and the private sector to find sustainable solutions to the problems of crime and social exclusion.

The challenge

The new website

TVP had a website that was outdated, cluttered and in need of a makeover and enhanced structure. The Events & Networks Manager at TVP, Bron Jones, had some basic editing and maintenance skills - but no web design knowledge or html skills to enable her to improve the website

Our help

One of iT4C's most experienced volunteers, Tim Huckvale, contacted Thames Valley Partnership and offered to share some of his 40 years experience with them. Tim worked with TVP both from home, via email and phone updates and also visited TVP's offices to work along side Bron to create a brand new site. The site had a proper structure; it had more colour and interest, yet it was easy enough for Bron to maintain, in the longer term. The site was launched in July 2010.

The results

• New website images better convey the breadth of TVP's work
• Valuable funds saved can be spent on TVP's community programmes
• The site is now the main outward facing marketing tool for TVP
• Good first impressions to potential funders who visit the site

What our client said

Tim was a real Godsend for us - we would never have been able to produce the final website with my minimal knowledge and certainly did not have the funds to pay for this to be done through an agency. Tim was pleasant, easy to work with and very accommodating of our time restrictions - he worked around any obstacles and certainly used his initiative to continue working on the site even when I was unable to get appropriate feedback to him. He even managed to check in to make sure the new site was running well from another volunteer role - on the remote island of Unst!

From Tim's point of view I expect it was sometimes frustrating when I could not come back with quicker feedback due to my other commitments.

Potential clients requesting volunteer IT help should be made aware that, if they are lucky enough to get a volunteer, they should be sure they have the internal resource/time to work with them in a timely way.

Bron Jones, Thames Valley Partnership

30th September 2010