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Case Study: Surfers Against Sewage
Project Type: Campaign and Ecommerce Site
Winner of 'Best Website' at The British Environment and Media Awards (BEMAS) 2007
Background
Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) is a UK-based non profit-making organisation campaigning for clean, safe recreational waters, free from sewage effluents, toxic chemicals, marine litter and nuclear waste.
Their core objective is to ensure that anyone who wishes to enjoy the water environment can do so without fear of sickness or long-term illness.
Despite SAS campaigns having considerable impact on the sewage debate many were still unaware of the ongoing campaign work carried out.
Project overview
Working with a wide and varied audience the task was to engage them with a range of scientific, education and environmental information in a clear and easy to navigate way, allowing users to access the details of interest to them.
E-commerce systems needed to be a core part of the site, enabling the organisation to attract campaign funds through the sales of merchandise and associated products.
Analysis of the organisation’s internal systems uncovered a number of areas for technical development that would drive organisational efficiency and save valuable funds needed for campaign work.
Providing SAS with professional skills on an ongoing basis through an IT Partnership arrangement gives them access to between half an hour and 16 hours per day as required. This partnership allows uknetweb to continuously monitor site performance and appropriately tweak and develop their site over time to maximise potential.
"The ongoing nature of this relationship allows us at uknetweb to calculate in advance work levels, which ultimately means it costs us less in human resources - a saving passed directly to our clients"
"Nobody understands how a site works like we do, this service means we can pull some amazing results from the site." Toby Parkins, MD, uknetweb.
Backend email systems provide SAS with powerful mechanisms to attract site visitors. More than 3,000 site visitors subscribed to regular updates from the organisation in the first 9 months of going live.
Security certificates and a secure integrated payment gateway give customers piece of mind, knowing that their personal data is securely processed internally through the website.
The British Environmental and Media Awards - What the judges said
“The website for Surfers Against Sewage impressed the judges with its clarity of purpose; its willingness to reach out to a variety of audiences; and the enthusiasm and emotion it brought to its campaign message, which is passionate and focused.”
The SAS site built by uknetweb beat off competition from both the Telegraph/Earth site and Green TV.
Technologies used in developing the site for SAS
XHTML
CSS
PHP
MySQL
JavaScript
“Over the past 8 years uknetweb have been really proud to have helped support the SAS campaign through managing and building 3 websites for SAS. It's awesome to think that the latest website has managed to beat off the competition from other far higher budget websites and come out on top.". Toby Parkins, MD, Uknetweb.