SSHC: Design and Development with Umbraco 7
Website Design & Development | .NET | Government
The Sydney Sexual Health Centre (SSHC) opened in 1933, making it the longest running sexual health service in NSW. This award-winning centre offers testing, treatment and management for sexually transmitted infections (STI) and HIV, and is funded by the NSW Ministry of Health.
The SSHC provides an invaluable service to the community of Sydney, with services including a general clinic, express testing, a youth clinic, Thai and Chinese clinics, a free needle syringe program and counselling. The SSHC website also provides an online risk assessment tool for people who believe that they are at risk of having an STI or HIV.
When the team at TWMG won a contract with NSW Health to redevelop the SSHC website, we were proud to play a role in helping the SSHC care for the health needs of Australians.
Diagnosis: Switching to Umbraco 7
The first step TWMG took in redeveloping the SSHC website was to choose a content management system (CMS), which would be cost effective, user friendly, and supported websites built on an ASP.NET MVC. Our client ended up choosing Umbraco 7, an open source CMS which supports ASP.NET built websites.
Umbraco 7 is user friendly and simple to install, and can be used by web designers and developers as well as content creators. Umbraco 7 is also very flexible, able to run small campaigns up to complex applications and large sites, making it perfect for the SSHC website. Umbraco 7 is free to use, and developers can either integrate or incorporate their own design, as we did with SSHC, or make use of the included starter kits. This CMS also offers professional support and tools, supported by an active community of users and team members to solve any issues or specific needs.
Treatment: Incorporating the SSHC Database
Our next task was to incorporate the SSHC website with Umbraco 7. This involved taking the existing website code and database of the SSHC website, and merging the existing SSHC project with a new Umbraco project. The benefit of choosing Umbraco as the CMS was that the team at SSHC would be able to upload and manage website content easily and effectively.
Once the projects had been merged, we began to configure the CMS with the required templates, documents and pages in preparation for migrating the content from the existing SSHC website. When we had the entire site in our staging environment, we discussed the result with our client, and upon approval, TWMG made the new website live.
Recovery: Configuring the New Website
As a result of switching to Umbraco 7, the team at SSHC are now able to manage elements of their website including page content, banner images, users, emails, footers and social media links quickly and easily. Being able to migrate over content from the old website by merging the two projects meant that no important information was lost in the transfer.
With their new CMS, the SSHC website is responsive, optimised for different platforms, user friendly and easy to navigate. This means that the team at the SSHC are able to concentrate on offering their health services to the Sydney community, and visitors to the site can easily acquire the knowledge that they need.
To learn more about the Sydney Sexual Health Centre, visit their website.
To put your business at the forefront of digital innovation, give us a call on
1300 008 964 or go back to www.twmg.com.au.
