Red Balloon, a local charity for the recovery of bullied children has gone live with a new design overhaul.

With the scheduled opening of several new centres nationally and big plans for the future, Red Balloon needed a ‘go to’ on the web that catered to anyone interested in their work. Realnet first designed and built their site in 2007 so they came to us for the upgrade.

As well as revamping the old site, improving the copy, and adding new features we went one step further and made micro sites for each of the schools with their own information and Ofsted reports.

One of the most important things for Red Balloon was having as much control over the site as possible. Changing copy, images, and whole pages was paramount, but at the same time had to be intuitive. We achieved this in the following ways;

• Giving Full Content Management across the site for anything that could change
• Building a simple and intuitive system behind the site that would allow even those who were less computer literate to make changes on the CMS
• By importing video feeds direct from the Red Balloon YouTube Channel onto the homepage without the need to update the site
• Using social media applications
• Allowing full content management of the news section including designating the school the article relates to. This then feeds only relevant information to each of the microsites
• We allow all the microsites to be managed internally including adding new locations
• We included the addition of a media centre which at present contains only downloadable resources that have been uploaded by Red Balloon but we hope to develop this further with the charity to incorporate a press pack and photo gallery.

Red Balloon have been a pleasure to work with, and a classic example of how we like to do business. Getting to the nitty gritty of the business, bouncing ideas around and building something that works well out of a really dynamic environment.