A new initiative led by several partner organisation to ensure training and development of rural skills in Cumbria.
Project Overview
When Cumbria’s main agricultural college closed in 2021, the county had no central hub to coordinate its land and nature courses. Young people began to find opportunities outside the county and the area’s outdoor skills gap widened. With land and nature roles crucial to the success of the Cumbrian countryside, key organisations in the area took action.
The Land and Nature Skills Service (LANSS) was born. Its role is to connect young people searching for careers in Cumbria with local training providers and employers.
The Challenge
When Tracey Jackson became Manager of LANSS in April 2024, she had little knowledge of what building a website entailed. And for a time, neither did her team.
While Tracey and the team were still busy defining the new service, A Digital was called upon to tackle the website build. The site had to be functional, easy to administer and attractive to all potential learners and local training providers.
External design agency branding and a grant-approved blueprint meant adhering to strict guidelines. And, with two years of funding secured, the LANSS website had to be scalable to evolve with the needs of the service. Our challenge was to bring the stakeholders' vision to life, on time and to brief.
Client Quote
In the tender process, A Digital stood out. It was clear they'd taken the time to understand the brief by reviewing and assessing exactly what we needed.
The Solution
Our first step was to understand user needs. With no single demographic as the target audience, we used research data to create 8 end-user personas of different ages, cultural and educational backgrounds. This enabled students’ potential goals and challenges to be identified and considered.
Hosting focus groups, additional research showed that students of all ages wanted a website that was both mobile-friendly and easy to navigate.
Having little website administration experience, the site’s content management needed to be intuitive and user-friendly to enable the LANSS team to hit the ground running. Building the website with Craft CMS gave the LANSS team the tools to meet the brief: flexible content modelling, a fully customisable design and an interface through which they could easily manage the day-to-day admin of the site without technical expertise.
Client Quote
The website is very easy to use. When we log in behind the scenes it’s well laid out and guides you step-by-step. We can preview changes before they go live to be sure they look right. And if we get stuck on something, the team at A Digital are on hand to help.
Integrating with Cumbria's Educational Institutions
Initially, the website was to include an account area for providers to upload their courses to the site. This was popular with smaller training providers, however, during discussions with industry professionals it became clear that an additional approach was needed for larger colleges and universities. These institutions had no spare resources to upload the huge volume of course information, and neither did LANSS.
A new feature allowing these larger providers to publish course information directly to the LANSS site from their own websites was added.
Client Quote
A Digital were very amenable to the changes we needed and they came up with ideas and solutions for us. We would have struggled to get the buy-in we needed from the bigger training providers without the additional work they’ve done. They’ve been so supportive and cooperative and that’s made the whole process much easier.
Results
Despite academic holidays and amendments to the brief, the new website went live in September 2024 as planned. The LANSS team held the formal launch at the prestigious Westmorland County Show.
Soon after the launch LANSS received expressions of interest from other major training providers including higher and further education institutions and the are tracking the website’s progress with interest.