Client brief and objectives

The Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) is the national accreditation and awarding body in Scotland. They work in partnership with industry, universities, colleges and schools to provide high quality, flexible, relevant qualifications and assessments - embedding industry standards where appropriate.

In early 2010 we were tasked with the redesign and development of the SQA's main website, www.sqa.org.uk. The challenge was to migrate the site to a new IA that made all 10,000 pages and 30,000 or so documents easily accessible via both search and navigation, while delivering for the multiple business teams that have different priorities within the SQA.

Our approach

The design of the new site needed to express the SQA's brand values and crucially enable rapid navigation of the sites large body of content. We devised a two layer navigation system which degrades gracefully in older browsers while allowing users of contemporary browsers to skip almost immediately to content deep in the site.

The SQA's site is managed on an ongoing basis by a combination of the SQA's own web team, CIVIC and the SQA's business managers who edit content in their own areas of the site, so the choice of CMS was crucial in ensuring that the workflow and security requirements of the client were met.

We created a comprehensive set of design mock-ups and an equally detailed set of web guidelines detailing colour palettes, templates, feature panels, sliders, videos and images. The web guidelines will ensure in the years to come that CIVIC and content editors at the SQA conform to a visual standard that keeps the site looking fresh, uncluttered and rational.

As with all of our clients SQA had a dedicated Account Manager managing the project from inception to implementation. During the project the dedicated Account Managers held regular update meetings (internal and external) to assess progress, schedule and budget. Project monitoring and sign-off was controlled by CIVIC's ISO9001 compliant Quality Manual.

Results and effectiveness

The migration to the new site took place during a four week content freeze and the site was published thereafter. The SQA has a cluster of six servers operated by CIVIC, which is ISO 27001 certified for hosting services.

URL

www.sqa.org.uk