Development of a membership Extranet aimed at people with an interest in the implementation of the Homelessness Act 2002.

http://www.homelessnessact.org.uk/
Free registration is required to access the site

		User login	Issues page

Shelter(1) is the UK campaigning charity for homeless and badly housed people. They decided to develop an online resource for people in the public, private, community or voluntary sectors that would be looking for information about implementation of the Act.

BOCC were approached to tender for the development of the Extranet and were appointed to develop the system specification and then implement a content managed Internet site. The implementation comprised of functional and programme design, database design and development, application development, testing, configuration management, launch and post-launch optimisation.

The site created allows registered users to view content created by Shelter including 'private' pages allocated to certain groups of members, for example those in a particular geographical region or who have attended a particular training course. However the site is interactive and members can communicate about the Act with other site members and Shelter staff, via discussion forums, email alert and messaging services.

BOCC developed the system with Shelter and provided a fully working test site to which the design, supplied by Reading Room as graphic mocks, was applied. This fast-track approach allowed the graphical design to be undertaken in parallel with the programming. Special attention was made to website accessibility(2) requirements to ensure a wide audience are able to use the site effectively.

As a website that requires registration, it is the content, function and usability that determines whether people will make use of the site. From an initial group of pre-registrants, the site's usefulness has been passed on and the membership base has grown very quickly and comprises many key people in the public and voluntary sectors working with the Homelessness Act 2002.

As implementation of the Act proceeded, this site allowed members to exchange good practice ideas and network informally with others. The discussion forums have been managed well and continue to be well used.

Shelter have been able to use the site's messaging services to undertake email broadcasts to other mailing lists as well as targeted broadcasts to the site's members based on their country, local authority and occupation.

The Homelessness Act Implementation website is hosted on the Shelter's dedicated servers at BOCC. The servers are monitored 24 x 7 by our own systems staff. The site is maintained using a web-based content management system developed by BOCC to Shelter's requirements.

The site uses Microsoft SQL Server 7, Macromedia ColdFusion, Index Server and Internet Information Server as the main technologies. Pages output to browsers are Extensible HyperText Markup Language 1.0(3) and Cascading Style Sheets 2.0(4) compliant.

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