The Princess Royal Trust for Carers
The Princess Royal Trust for Carers is one of the leading charities concerned with carers; those who look after young, sick, old and disabled people in their own homes.
What the Trust needed
The previous site needed a complete overhaul. There was a growing understanding within the Trust that carers.org presented a vital communication channel to and between carers as well as a source of information and support surrounding benefits, the law and practical advice.
The Trust needed a new site that looked better, was easier to manage, much easier to find online and would help build the growing community of carers nationwide.
What the OTHER media did
The heart of the site is our content management system, OTHERobjects CMS and this has been extended to include message boards and Intranet functionality to support communication and knowledge sharing between the 118 Carers Centres across the country.
The design is modern and simple with the emphasis placed on providing regular visitors (and the first timer) with access to the information they need.
We have built a powerful advice database and The Trust will grow this with regular content over the coming weeks and months. We have used a faceted approach to search which allows collections of found items to be explored by narrowing down on particular facets.
We have also extended our publication model to automatically cross reference between the community features of the site and this rich information database. A message board thread about Alheimers will be accompanied by links to resources and articles on the same topic.
The results
The site has been recently launched and it is too early to report on the effectiveness of the new site components. We are confident however that the approach we have taken gives the editorial team at The Princess Royal Trust for Carers considerable flexibility in trying out new ideas and experimenting with new content.