Helping and protecting adults in Norfolk

Norfolk Safeguarding Adults Board (NSAB) leads adult safeguarding arrangements across the local area. It also oversees the effectiveness of the safeguarding work of its member and partner agencies.

The website brief

Bigfork were appointed to develop the new NSAB website with the aims of improving navigation, website design and meeting the latest accessibility standards.

The website’s primary goal is to provide relevant information and regular updates for safeguarding professionals, partner agencies and the public in Norfolk. It needs to be flexible and future-proofed, making it easy for the NSAB team to update pages, upload new resources and publish relevant news stories.

The key issues identified were:

• The website was difficult to navigate
• Key content including resources, publications and training/development opportunities were hard to find
• It wasn’t clear what NSAB do and how they can help

Designing with accessibility standards in mind

The new website was designed to be accessible and meet the WCAG AA 2.1 standard. This includes features such as the ability to navigate with non-mouse devices e.g., touch and keyboard, and optimisation for screen readers. We also produced an accessibility statement in line with guidelines to display on the website.

Many content pages include reference to accompanying documents and resources. We designed the new content pages to include an area to clearly list documents as well as a sidebar area to highlight important information.

New website structure and navigation

The previous NSAB website was content rich with many content pages and public-facing documents. However, it was difficult for users to navigate around the website and find content relevant to them.

A key part of the new design is a ‘megamenu’ which splits content pages into key categories and sub-categories, making it easier for users to find relevant content.

The previous website mainly used standard hyperlink styles to show links to documents. As part of the new design we have introduced new ways to display documents. These include ‘pill’ style buttons to distinguish document links from the standard text, and feature boxes which include a screenshot, making it easier for users to recognise.

All documents are also listed in a new document library. The document library allows users to search by keyword (matching search terms to document titles) and filter documents by category, tags and date published.