I have been commissioned to redesign, re-information architect and rebuild (that a lot of re-something-ing) the Hammersmith United Charities website.

One of the most crucial things that forced the client to contact web designers was the publication of various reports they commissioned by the London School of Economics, some of which run to 80 odd pages of A4.

These reports are to be published both as downloadable pdf’s and hyperlinked documents (for reference and bookmarking).

Currently the website is based around a simple CMS written in ASP, which allows the user to input basic text for a given page. Whilst researching the project after meeting with the client a few things became evident:

• The CMS was rather limiting, a ‘post’ style CMS would allow content elements to be reused around the site
• The url’s produced by the CMS where horrible!
• It didn’t offer much functionality with regards to templating.

All these things lead me to recommend that the CMS was replaced, I simply would not have enough power or freedom using the existing system to do this efficiently. Key to this was the reports for a TOC at the header (or footer) of each page would be crucial.

So it is being replaced! All in all it’s quite an enormous job, featuring not only a redesign, a new CMS, video encoding, improved semantics, improved accessibility, pdf generation and a whole rethink of the information architecture.

Time to go to work!