Zero Harm - Business Leaders’ Health & Safety Forum

Size: 180+ page website

My professional status: independent web designer/developer

Website client: Business Leaders’ Health & Safety Forum

Dates: February 2015 - November 2020

Categories: Client liaison, Project manager, IA & UX, Website designer, Front-end developer, Writing for the web, Content-loader, Webmaster, Responsive web design/dev, CSS-based layout, CSS3, HTML5, jQuery/JavaScript, SilverStripe, Medium sites

Brief: The Business Leaders’ Health and Safety Forum is a coalition of business and government leaders committed to improving the performance of workplace health and safety in New Zealand. Their vision is all business leaders passionately committed to achieving Zero Harm Workplaces. They needed a new webmaster to take care of their website, and approached me after a personal recommendation from one of my other clients.

I was responsible for regularly updating their responsive website, creating and removing pages, content-loading, making graphics, and editing/proofreading content. I was also responsible for doing a full content audit of the website and reviewing the website IA with a view to updating and improving it. I was also responsible for social media consultation, helping the organisation to decide what social media to use and how to use it.

My responsibilities included:

• Adding content to the website, updating as requested - including adding or removing pages, editing content, updating or creating graphics, proof-reading and uploading videos
• Carrying out a site audit that lists all pages on the website and presents these as a wireframe sitemap diagram
• Reviewing the architecture of the Forum website in light of the site audit, determining whether and how the main site sections need to be re-arranged (in consultation with Forum staff and with reference to Google Analytics data). Re-drawing wireframe sitemap diagram to reflect this new architecture
• Reviewing the homepage, potentially re-arranging this or adding elements to it
• Re-designing the homepage if required
• Re-building the homepage HTML/CSS if required (responsive website)
• Overseeing WebWeaver’s programmer Tom St George re-integrating the new homepage into the CMS
• Carrying out the restructure of the website architecture within SilverStripe
• Helping the Forum to decide what type(s) of social media to use, how to use them, who would use them and how often, and what is appropriate.

The website was built in SilverStripe, which was great, as it meant it was easy to figure out what was what and how to update it. In addition I had a very good handover meeting with the previous webmaster, who gave me a complete set of files and documentation relating to the site. Excellent.

I updated the website for the Zero Harm team on a regular basis for five years. In 2020 they decided to completely redesign the website, and asked if I would be interested in doing the work. Sadly, I was already fully booked on other web projects and so had to decline, but I acted as their technical adviser during their search for another web design company, and provided feedback about reasonable costs during their web hosting negotiations.