Institute of Cancer Research unveils new-look website

By Jessica Twentyman

The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR), Europe’s leading cancer research centre, has unveiled its new website, designed to serve the needs of a wide audience: the international cancer research community, medical practitioners, people affected by cancer, students, jobseekers, fundraisers and supporters.

According to Joe McFadden, IT strategy director at the ICR, the design and structure of the previous site, launched back in 2000, was beginning to look and feel dated and managing it had become a cumbersome process for the ICR’s IT team.

“Visitors found it quite hard to navigate and said it was tricky to find information that was relevant to them. To be frank, the website didn’t ‘signpost’ information well, so visitors were liable simply to give up rather than spend hours searching for what they needed,” he said.

A comprehensive redesign of the 1,500-page site was planned in collaboration with Underwired, a specialist digital design agency. During this process, different user profiles were identified (for example, doctors, patients, students and so on), and the individual needs of each category were carefully considered.

Once the new website’s design and structure was agreed, says McFadden, Underwired was also instrumental in helping the ICR to find an appropriate content management system (CMS) to underpin the new site and deliver content to it. Ultimately, the ICR chose Percussion Software’s Rhythmyx package and appointed Percussion partner Unified Solutions to implement it.

“We have a fairly complex website for an organisation of our size and we needed a solution that was flexible and powerful enough to deliver the right content to the right audience,” says McFadden. “As a small team, we were concerned about the time and potential business disruption in moving to the new system, but 1,500 web pages were migrated into Rhythmyx with ease.”

The website went live on 10 March 2006 and the ICR is now rolling out the end-user content management tools that will enable staff to create their own web pages and upload them to the site themselves. “That was one of the main selling points of Rhythmyx – the promise that employees around the Institute could all participate in keeping the site up-to-date, without having to rely on the IT department,” says McFadden.

That roll-out is being tackled on a department-by-department basis, starting with fundraising and public relations employees at the Institute. In the next phase of the project, says McFadden, Rhythmyx will be extended to underpin the ICR’s new staff intranet.