Bringing a community together
ISHA is a small, resident focused, social housing and home ownership community in North and East London.
The website had not been updated for many years and so no longer represented the visual language used by ISHA as well as having outdated functionality.
The purpose of the website is more than the provision of information; it also helps the community to manage their homes, connect with their neighbourhood, and experience a supportive living environment with ISHA.
Our Approach
Website and competitor review
The first part of the engagement was to produce a website review of the existing website and benchmark it against 5 similar organisations. This allowed ISHA to understand both the design and structural issues within the existing site as well as seeing how their peer group were using their websites to tell their stories and provide digital pathways to services for their users.
The report helped to get senior level engagement and ensure the project was supported from the start.
Brief creation
While the client had a broad running brief we helped them to distill this into a much tighter and well defined statement of work. This is an essential part of our working process and ensures that we are all aligned both from a deliverables and success factor perspective.
Governance structures
A website steering group was created with senior ISHA leadership, tenants representatives and employees. We had regular meetings with the steering group to ensure that they were updated both with the progress of the project as well as the creative direction. By involving them from beginning to end, this ensured that the final sign off by the senior leadership team was a smooth process.
The creative
From the brief we outlined a number of different creative routes and worked with the client to then create both a brand, design and functional framework. Using the framework approach reduces the need to layout every page for approval, this helps to move the project quickly into development but allowing flexibility for changes as we go through the build.
Stakeholder engagement and feedback
During the design and build we closely involved a stakeholder engagement group compiled from tenants in the various different locations which ISHA covered. The diversity of the group ensured we reflected the actual users of the site.
We held both online and in person sessions to ensure full accessibility for the group and collated feedback both through online scoring systems and qualitative feedback.
This feedback was shared with the internal ISHA project team and allowed us to implement changes in design and structure throughout the process.
Accessibility from the start
An intrinsic part of the brief was to ensure that the site was delivered with AA Accessibility to WCAG 2.2 standards. This means ensuring that accessibility is not just part of the design approach but is also embedded at code level. We also implemented a toll which provides further on page remediation options to ensure full accessibility for all clients.
From design to development to deployment
We operate our development in sprint phases with regular “show and tell” sessions, this ensures a continuous feedback loop.
In addition each sprint has quality assurance phases to ensure that assessments on the code base and functionality are addressed all the way through the delivery and means significantly less time is spent in client user acceptance testing.
We defined a high performance and robust Azure hosting solution to ensure our client had best in class site performance.
Post delivery
Imobisoft have also been awarded the ongoing support and maintenance of the site and we continue to develop new functionality and are currently engaged with delivery of AI features to certain aspects of the site.
Why Umbraco
The ISHA website is delivered using the Umbraco CMS platform. Umbraco is a powerful and flexible open-source content management system built on Microsoft’s .NET framework. Here’s why we think it is a great choice as a CMS platform:
- User-Centric Content Management. The platform features an intuitive, clean administrative interface that content editors find easy to navigate. The backend is designed with non-technical users in mind, allowing them to manage content efficiently without requiring extensive training.
- Scalability and Performance. Umbraco handles everything from small business websites to large enterprise applications with high traffic volumes. Its robust architecture supports complex, multi-site implementations and can scale as your business grows.
- Strong Community and Support. Being open-source, Umbraco benefits from an active global community of developers who contribute packages, extensions, and ongoing improvements. There’s also commercial support available through Umbraco HQ for enterprise clients who need guaranteed service levels.
- Security and Reliability. The platform maintains strong security standards with regular updates and patches. Its .NET foundation provides enterprise-grade reliability and integrates well with existing Microsoft infrastructure and security protocols.
- Cost-Effective. The core CMS is free to use, making it an attractive option for organizations looking to minimize licensing costs while still accessing professional-grade functionality. You only pay for hosting and development resources.
