Learning to Love the Environment

CEES is the Environmental Education Service arm of Cambridgeshire County Council. It works in conjunction with Eco-Centres and Cambridgeshire Outdoors to help schools to bring learning about the environment to life.

CEES aims to encourage an understanding of sustainable lifestyles and to improve children's knowledge of the environment through first-hand experience.

CEES required a redesign for their existing website. They wanted a colourful website which would showcase their work and also provide extensive information on the various courses available to Cambridgeshire schools at its four centres based in Stibbington, Upware, Wisbech and Coldham. They also wanted to provide downloadable resources for teachers to use in the classroom.

Taking the existing CEES logo (which is blue and green) as a starting point, we created a design which suggests sky and earth, with a graded blue header and a grass footer. Drop-down CSS menus make all 30 pages accessible from the home page and also make them easily navigable by search engines.

The Courses for Every Class pages on the CEES website all contain tables of information specified by the site owner. These are all coded to meet W3C Accessibilty Standards.

The centres' pages all required several images, but had only a small amount of accompanying text. In order to display the images at a good size, we used a rotating fade-image show on each of these pages.

CEES also wished to be able to update one section of the website themselves: the CEES News, Views & Events page. For this we installed an online editor with a simple admin interface which permits the site owner to add text, tables and links themselves.

The website was created in Chads Web Studio near Stamford, Lincs