The Background
The College of Nurses of Ontario (CNO), located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, is the regulatory body for registered nurses, registered practical nurses and nurse practitioners across Ontario. This means CNO handles establishment of licensure requirements, quality assurance and enforcement of standards and conduct.
The nursing profession in Ontario is self-regulating, which means CNO is the lead source of information on regulation changes, practice standards and licensure requirements. This kind of visibility comes with a need for clear, well-organized content and a well-designed website for maximum findability.
The Process
Blend worked with CNO to focus on four major goals.
- Allow CNO to take control of their content through migration to a new CMS and effective content re-use
- Identify audiences and allow them to easily access relevant content
- Begin the move toward a self-service site
- Distribute the publishing of web content
In conjunction with C. David Gammel's initial strategy findings, Blend designed and developed a site that matched the needs of CNO's users. There was no "jumping right in" stage - CNO's site was a careful, deliberate strategy-to-launch project.
- single-sign-on authentication for editors and nurses, allowing for one-time authentication to a host of web applications
- multi-lingual support, which allowed editors to create simultaneous French and English content on the same page and users to gain access to a full French search
Blend continues to help CNO with workflows as they move closer to a fully distributed web publishing model.
The Launch
Development was done in .Net using EPiServer as a CMS, and integrated several unique features:
The site launched to the public September 2010, and signified the first step toward CNO's dedication to a new web strategy. Since launch of the new design, 1.5 million people have visited the site with over 13 million page views (as of January 31, 2012). And Blend is currently working with CNO to develop a new intranet solution.
"Some firms don't play well with others, which can cause havoc for their unlucky clients who have to seamlessly mesh a diverse array of platforms, systems and providers. On this project, the Blend team worked well not only with me, an outside strategy consultant, but also with CNO's in-house IT shop and existing providers. The results speak for themselves: an holistic website that is fully adopted and supported by CNO's staff and other partners. Blend has the ability to come into complex enterprise environments and make a difference without a lot of havoc."
- C. David Gammel, High Context Consulting, author of Online and On Mission