UCAC

Client Overview

UCAC was established in Cardiff in 1940 by a group of teachers who saw the need for a teachers union with aims, policies and services that would correspond to the specific needs of teachers living and working in Wales.

At the time of its establishment, UCAC was a pioneering organisation and the first professional trade union to be established in Wales by Welsh people for Wales.

UCAC has grown and developed in all aspects since 1940 and has specific departments for members who are head teachers and lecturers. Without a doubt, ICAC is a flourishing union that can stand shoulder to shoulder with any other union.

Business requirements

As UCAC has expanded over the previous years, the one thing that had not expanded, nor stood the test of time very well was the UCAC web site.

UCAC realised that a web site is a 24hr a day communications engine where visitors would want to find information not only about the UCAC union, but also find out more information about current affairs, previous news information and also register for membership.

Thus the requirement was to create a new web site which would facilitate ease of use, pleasing to the eye, multilingual capabilities, simple navigation, registration facilities etc.

An additional requirement was also to couple the front end web site with an administration portal whereby UCAC users could keep the site up to date themselves.

The final requirement was to make the site as user friendly as possible taking in to consideration user accessibility options.

Solution Provided

The solution provided by Yellowbus consisted of several steps, these being design briefs and story boards, user requirements and navigation mapping and finally concluding in an updatable multilingual web site satisfying all user and visitor requirements.

The project was split in to 2 separate solutions, the first being the multilingual administration utility and the second being the actual web site.

The administration utility comprised of a textual navigational layout of the site allowing the user to quickly select which page/item they would like to work on, a WYSIWYG editor facilitating advanced page content editing and a news layout solution allowing the user to lay articles out in a column/row format.

The solution also integrates a text only view of the web site increasing user accessibility.

Technology Used

The technology used in this project consists of ASP.NET web solution providing the presentation layer, VB.NET providing the business layer objects and rules finally ending in a SQL 2005 database utilising stored procedures, triggers and views to provide the data engine for the site.