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FORWARD - African Diaspora campaign and support charity

The Foundation for Women's Health, Research and Development (FORWARD) is an African-women led, international non-governmental organisation that works to advance the sexual and reproductive health and human rights of African girls and women.

As is the case with many of the organisations we come into contact with, FORWARD had plenty of content. But the other important elements were in short supply:

• The content was not well organised on the website
• Much of the content was out of date
• The website was highly inaccessible, making it difficult for many user groups - search engines included - to access the content
• The website was difficult to use: most users would have given up long before they discovered the wealth of content on offer.

The "Before" Picture

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Putting things right

When we first talked to FORWARD, we learned that one of its volunteers had already completed a visual design for the website. They were also ready and willing to revamp their content. All that remained was for BRAINBOX to provide the missing links - the Content Management System aand the Web Development expertise - to tie the whole thing together.

In fact, the whole project fitted neatly into our Development Process:

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Website Development

• Visual Design
• Technical Design
• Content Development

Visual Design

The visual design for the website was done by Nuerki Oyortey - a FORWARD volunteer - and features artwork by Gabrielle Pool.

(Gabrielle Pool's website is stunning - well worth a visit.)

One of the nice things about the design is the section-specific "colour scheme."

Content Development

FORWARD's Sarah Fisher took the lead on Content Development. She adopted a top-down approach:

• Established the top-level navigation - the "sections" of the website.
• Organised the content around these sections, modifying (and adding to) the content as required.

The result was a very large Word document representing some 150 website pages, which we used to populate the Powered by BRAINBOX Content Management System.

Technical Design

Yes, we did some work too!

The FORWARD website is built upon the latest version of our Powered by BRAINBOX Content Management System. Its key features are:

• Control over every page on the website
• A choice of BBCode or HTML markup for each page
• Separation of the management of structural/navigational pages and list items (such as News items)
• Automatic promotion of new News and Event items (they are featured on the Home Page)
• Automatic archiving of old News and Event items

Search Engine Optimisation

The "old" website was all but invisible to search engines, for the following reasons:

1. The website was very search engine unfriendly:
   • Not all of the pages could be accessed by search engines
   • Within each page, it wasn't easy to distinuish elements such as titles
   • There was no metadata - the hidden information containing the page's title and description
2. The content quality was poor:
   • Not well organised
   • Out of date
3. The website wasn't considered to be "important" by the web community.

Search Engine Friendly

All BRAINBOX website are built to be search engine friendly.

Content Quality

Sarah's work on the content is not only great for human users, it's a delight for search engines.

And the Powered by BRAINBOX Content Management System means that FORWARD are able to change the content frequently - something else that the search engines value.

Website "Importance"

Search engines judge the importance of a website by the quantity and (especially) the quality of its inbound links. (Inbound links are links on external websites that "point" to the website.)

FORWARD is committed to eliminating harmful gender-based discriminatory practices such as Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and Child Marriage.

BRAINBOX continues to support FORWARD by providing hosting and maintenance free of charge.