WEB DESIGN & WEB DEVELOPMENT FOR LOC ONLINE
LOC Online is the second website of the optical trilogy that we built in colloboration with Cream, with the other two being LOCSU and Primary Eyecare.
There are 75 LOCs (Local Optical Committees) across the UK.
Each LOC requires a website that allows local optical professionals to learn about their staff / committee, what services are operating in that area and any other information that the LOC would like to communicate.
To set the scene, the quality of websites, for those LOCs who even had a website, was poor.
It was therefore necessary to provide each LOC with the opportunity to have their own professional website in terms of both aesthetics and functionality.
To ensure it was a quality offering, we built a number of templates which offer customisation and consistency across the LOCs.
The whole network of sites is centrally managed. This ensures not only 100% consistency across the site by virtue of the fact that everyone gets everything, but also that security and updates are consistent across all sites.
As well as allowing individual LOCS to publish their own news, we also pull in a news feed from their parent site LOCSU. This is a clever way of generating fresh content for each LOC if for whatever reason they haven’t managed to or do not have anything to publish on their own site.
The CMS is highly intuitive and allows for a number of customisations. So whilst there is a common look and feel across the LOCs, they can still maintain their individual brand.
On top of that we built a portal through which to access them all.
Individual LOCs set up their own websites but there is a consistent look and feel across the websites
KEY FEATURES OF THE LOC ONLINE WEBSITE
CMS Integration
The website is integrated into the fantastic WordPress CMS.
It uses the multi-site functionality which allows new websites to be create as and when required.
Within each site there are a number of configuration options available to the LOCs to ensure they have a unique, yet consistent look and feel.
Members only area
The LOCs require some of their content to be gated, so that only people who are members are able to access it.
We make this a simple process with just the click of a button required to turn a general page into a members only page.
If someone who is not a member tries to access any restricted page, they are redirected to a login page where they are also able to sign up to become a member.
Personal news feed
The LOCs need to keep the content on their websites fresh and the main way that they do this is by updating their news section.
This keeps the website “sticky” and encourages people to come back to the website.
News feed pulled in from LOCSU parent site
The parent website LOCSU maintains a news section and this news is also relevant to the individual LOCs.
We therefore pull in their latest two news articles into the website.
This not only helps with keeping the content on the individual LOCs fresh but also encourages interaction with the LOCSU website too.
