The Challenge
The Engineering Construction Industry Training Board works with employers and training providers to give the engineering construction industry workforce the skills it needs to meet the challenges of the future. We were approached by ECITB to help them bring an important new initiative to life with an online website and interactive tool.
Connected Competence was to become a key element for everyone in the engineering and construction industry to understand, and there were three key audiences that we had to support: the workers, the employers that they work for, and larger stakeholders who manage large sites and assets.
We needed to pull a large amount of technical information together, and display it in an easy-to-understand layout for a varied audience.
Approach & Design
We got to work early in this project with creating a simple design framework that would allow for the technical content to shine through. With the varied audiences in mind, we had to ensure that the hierarchy of the website was easy to follow, and put everything in a place that people would be able to find it easily.
The website would need to convey a lot of information with text, and so we created a layout and style that centred around clear and easy-to-read fonts. We worked closely with a copywriter to ensure that the design and layout would fit the required technical text, and also be accessible to a wide audience.
Scalability
The main website was built using a modern WordPress stack, where we used our development expertise to ensure that it could be easily extended and built upon. With the Connected Competence initiative in it's early stages, we knew that it would need to adapt over the coming years. By using scalable coding patterns, and building continuous integration & deployment in from the start, we were able to quickly build and iterate in the early stages.
A robust online application
Once we had the main website in place, we next had to create a web application which acted as a "digital handbook" to allow people to map the new initiative to their own systems.
We were tasked with taking excel-based files, which contained a large amount of technical data, and making them easy-to-understand and integrate through the use of our tool. We leveraged the same clean layout as we used in the marketing site, and created an online tool that could be accessed anywhere.
By using libraries such as TailwindCSS, we created a fully responsive app which is as easy to view on a mobile phone as it is on a desktop device.
You can see the live website at https://connectedcompetence.co.uk/.