Associative Trails

Croxley Rail Link CMS

Retro-fitted content management to the rescue

A bespoke CMS retro-fitted to an existing static site.

A clean and intuitive interface helps non-technical staff can keep the website updated.Keeping the public informed about major civil engineering works in the local area requires a vast amount of information to be published and be reliable navigated.

The challenge

The original Croxley Rail Link website was built without any content management interface, meaning team members could not easily maintain or update the vast amount of information about the major infrastructure construction project, including the proceeds of the extensive public enquiry.

We were approached by Arup, a global engineering consultancy, to retro-fit a content management system to allow easy maintenance - but without altering the existing website design.

Retro-fitted CMS without changing the existing website design

The solution

The Content Management System (CMS) we built to administer the public-facing website provides team members with a clean and intuitive interface that requires no technical knowledge or training but retains enough power and flexibility to keep the website fresh and pertinent. Key features include:

  • A Microsoft Word-style rich text editor to write page body text
  • Search engine friendly page URLs
  • Automated news listings
  • Automatic optimisation and resizing of images, saving time and expense on specialist image editing software and training
  • Content publication scheduling and expiry
  • The ability to specify page review dates to ensure content is regularly reviewed
  • Full versioning and rollback
Full management of site navigation including content pages, documents and external links Image optimisation and resizing
Content page editing via WYSIWYG editor, keywords, search engine friendly URLs, content expiry and review

The outcome

The website is now much easier to keep up to date. This is especially important as building work on project progresses.

Automated news listings
Image metadata and usage

Technologies used

Python, Django, MySQL, HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, Bootstrap.

 Jump to top