blog archive.

Change Tracker is a new web tool that we’ve launched this week with South Gloucestershire Council . The Change Tracker tool has been developed to help parents, professionals, children and young people assess how support plans are meeting their needs.  

Change Tracker has been developed as a tool for practitioners to use within their own settings and services in South Gloucestershire. It aims to support planning to improve outcomes for children and young people, and also to measure the progress that each plan achieves. 

It is hoped that children, young people and their families will be involved in using Change Tracker as a means of engaging them in being a part of every support plan, and also to support them in objectively defining their own needs and desired outcomes. The tool has been designed to be used by a range of partners in a variety of settings and this website is just one representation of the information.

The functionality that we’ve developed for this site includes providing users with the ability to ‘browse’ the main question headings or use a ‘search’ function to create an assessment, with the added ability to re-order questions through a simple drag and drop facility. During an assessment if there are any responses given that may cause concern, a non-intrusive message appears with links to additional pages for where to get help. 

The design of the website needed to be a clean, fresh and modern design that reflects professionalism and is also engaging for any young people using the tool. The final design is based around providing positive change and we think the cartoon sunrise captures this perfectly. 

It's been a pleasure to be involved in such a worthwhile and fulfilling project, you can check out the site HERE!

So by now you’ve probably seen that your profile and your friends have changed to the new Timeline feature on Facebook…do you like it? Not many people seem to…I however, am a fan. 

When I saw that Facebook was rolling out to the brand pages I was looking forward to seeing the results. We look after a few Facebook pages for our clients, so I was keen to see what the difference would be. 

First impression was that this format is better – key thing for me is that it looks more modern, easier to promote specific posts, and I’m happy the page gating is gone…too many pages have far too many gates for my liking and some pages you came across had a 20 strong list of gates for each campaign they were running. 

So what’s changed? Well quite a bit..I’ve detailed below the main changes that I see: 

1. Cover Photo – this is the first thing people will see...there are some new guidelines from Facebook on this, which focus on removing the promotional element of page gates.
2. Tabs – these have replaced the links on the left hand side of the old layout and you have the ability to choose 3 of the 4 featured tabs. 
3. About – the ‘About’ section has been given prominence underneath the profile picture. 
4. Messages – users have the ability to message brand pages. 
5. Admin Panel – the new admin panel provides page owners with insights and notifications all in one place.
6. History – users can easily and quickly go through your status updates, photos, posts quick and easily with the history panel. 
7. Pinning and Highlighting – page owners have the ability to pin and highlight posts to give more prominence to important updates. 

With the rollout happening on 30th March…next week is your last chance to make amends to your page before it’s released to the public

Last week we proudly launched a great new site for Findability Bristol. It’s an online directory for disabled children and their families, offering information about services, organisations and events in Bristol.

We’ve loved working on the site with the Findability team, and especially enjoyed developing some of its more engaging features, including:
•  Changing home page image every time you visit
•  Advanced search, enabling postcode and category filters
•  Scrolling events calendar
•  Site accessibility features such as Text Resize and Text Only
•  Blog – enabling the Findability team to keep in touch with users.

Findability is a Bristol-based portal site for 1Big Database, an online community database we set up for Bristol, Bath & North East Somerset and South Gloucestershire back in 2004.  Findability filters data from 1BD for it’s relevance to disability, and reflects this in the results it shows to the user. It’s an ongoing project, relying on the listees’ details being updated regularly and accurately, therefore providing better and more relevant results for users as time goes on.

We’re delighted to have been a part of such a worthwhile project, and would thank the partnership involved:
• 1Big Database (Bristol City Council, Bath & North East Somerset   Council, South Gloucestershire Council)
•  Bristol Parent Carers
•  BCC Disability Communications Group.

Check out the site here!