National Open College Network
Overview
The National Open College Network (NOCN) provides national qualifications and programmes in a wide range of subject areas and offers a local accreditation service, through the regional OCNs, that provides recognition of achievement through the award of credit.
Recently the NOCN has gone through a period of consolidation collapsing a mulitude of regions down into eleven main regions. As part of this consolidation process the websites for these regions will become more structured and offer relevant content from both the national website and regional content.
Website
Background
During 2005 Solid State Group was comissioned to produce the website for the western region of the Open college Network (now know as Open College Network South West Region). As part of this project the website was built on the WebDeck content management system and integrated with the NOCN course database giving course providers, employers and learners access to all the information on all of the courses offered regionally.
Objectives
- Bring all 11 regions and the NOCN website into line with one brand
- Allow generic content from the NOCN site to be used on the regional OCN websites, whilst keeping the individual OCN website addresses
- Allow regional information to be edited by users within each region
- Include search functionality that allows users to find course information within various industry sectors and course untis
- Create intuitive websites that are clean and clear and search engine friendly
Solution
After the success of this regional project, it was showcased to the NOCN would decided to adopt the system for the national site and all of the regions. NOCN wanted the regional sites to use much of the content from the national site but be able to add regional content to make the website more relevant to local users.
The result is a website where both national and regional websites are all running on the WebDeck content management system with national staff having permissions to edit all the national content and regional staff with permissions to edit all the regional content.
The regional sites are pulling a large percentage of the content from the national site and so the content across all regions is always inline and always the most up to date versions. Regional staff don't need to worry about updating the generic content and can concentrate on making the site more regional and appealing to local users.
Integration with the OPUS database of courses used by the OCN's ensure that all the latest course information is available on all the OCN websites 24 hours a day.
The regional sites also maintain the brand guidelines, but are styled with regional colours giving clear indications as to which site the user is currently viewing.
The OCN websits are all produced to the highest web standards validating to XHTML 1.1 and are optimised for excellent search engine rankings. Positions are climbing daily.
About Solid State Group
Solid State Group is a content management, web applications and services consultancy which was founded in 2002 with a desire to provide solutions which are more time and cost-efficient. Leveraging the managing partners experience in the IT consulting, financial and marketing sectors, Solid State Group has built a strong reputation for robust products that can be rapidly and effectively implemented across a broad range of industry sectors. For more information please visit www.solidstategroup.com or call 0845 8382163