We’ve been working with Bournemouth University’s Marketing and Communications department since 2009. Over that time the team at Base have delivered accessibility testing, coding standards implementation and design consultancy for key areas of the university’s 100k page site.
We’ve delivered high specification XHTML templates using the Blueprint CSS framework ready for integration into BU’s legacy content management system. With accessibility top of the agenda we consulted on design, usability and developed a series of templates that could be used to deploy pages by BU staff, under pressure to publish content quickly and efficiently to the 100k page academic website, without letting accessibility standards slide.
On a separate piece of work we were also commission to deliver a standalone publishing system for the university’s home page, which would allow the editing team to push up to date content to the home page without the need for a database connection on the visitor side. Keeping the page load time down was an important requirement alongside the crucial accessibility requirements. On this occasion the BU marketing team provided the concept artwork and we brought them to life using a process known as progressive enhancement, a technique that builds up a pages content incrementally based on the client-side technologies available. This provided users with a consistent user experience across a range of operating systems and browsers, in a multitude of states; no javascript, no flash plugin installed etc.
And it’s not only the Marketing and Communication department we’ve worked with. Having seen the delivery of two other BU projects the university’s IT department commissioned the team at Base to design and build a skin for the in-house course management system Cohort.
In 2009 Bournemouth University were nominated the UK’s Number One New University and we’ve been working closely with multiple BU teams to assist the continued delivery of high quality digital communications.