A programme with many readers
TreatOA was a European research programme on osteoarthritis. From 2008 to 2013 it joined ten universities, institutes and companies to King's College London, which coordinated it. The work came to us through TwinsUK, our client at King's since 2012.
A consortium answers to several readers at once: the funder, the member institutions, other researchers and the public. Each comes for a different part. A funder checks what was delivered. A researcher looks for a result or a paper. A newcomer wants to know what osteoarthritis research the programme did, and who did it.
Build on what does not date
News and events date fast. The parts of a programme that last are its shape and its output: the aims, the institutions, the work packages, the advisory board and the publications.
So the site gave each of those its own place. The consortium page listed every institution. Each of the eleven work packages had its own page, with its participants and objectives. Publications were listed by year. A reader arriving years later could still find who did what, and what came of it.
Plan it before anyone draws it
The brief arrived on 14 June 2013. Eleven days later, 17 wireframes set out every page type, from the home page to publications, downloads, search and the members' login.
Planning the structure first fixed where each lasting part would live before any design work began. The design then had one job: to make that structure plain to read.
Give the members their own room
Members had an area of their own behind a login, designed and built in August 2013. It held the analysis software, the research results and the reports the programme owed its funder.
Keeping the working material there let the public site stay about the research, not about the running of the consortium.
Four questions before your grant ends
- Which parts last? List the pages that will still matter in five years: aims, partners, outputs, publications.
- Who will own it? Name the institution that keeps the domain, the hosting and the login once the funding stops.
- What dates the site? Move news, events and deadlines away from the parts a reader will still look for.
- Where do members' files go when the consortium closes, and who can still reach them?
The TreatOA case study shows the earlier site, the consortium and work package pages, and describes the members' area. Our academic research page covers the other research work we do, and we build sites like it on WordPress.
A grant pays for the research project website once. The years after the grant decide whether it was worth building.
