We have been shortlisted by the Charity Times awards for the category ‘Best use of web’ for the redesign of healthtalk.org! Since launching the new improved website early last year, the charity has reached 5 times as many people as we were reaching in 2013 and given those visitors a far more user-friendly experience than before.

The website redesign was no small undertaking; healthtalk.org contains around 20,000 video clips and 5000 web pages. My colleague Adam and I, as the only members of staff in the charity at the time, worked tirelessly with the web developers to iron out the numerous issues we encountered along the way and to ensure a smooth transfer of data. Spoiler: the data didn’t transfer smoothly and the 2 of us had to check each page manually(!), so we’re very pleased that we have been shortlisted, alongside some fantastic charities, in recognition of this work. The award winners will be announced on October 7 2015.

The new website has brought financial benefits too, we are now able to reach 25 people for every ¬¨¬£1 we spend as a charity, up from 10 people in 2010. This is partly because we reach more people now and partly because we have made savings by doing more website maintanence in-house. It costs us ¬¨¬£60 per day to keep the website online now and lots of our supporters have committed to sponsor a day’s worth of costs per year, by setting up a monthly ¬¨¬£5 direct debit. Find out how you can adopt a day too.