Global recognition

The Centre for Maternal and Newborn Health (CMNH) at the Liverpool School for Tropical Medicine (LSTM) are gaining global recognition for their important work in capacity development in maternal and newborn health. The centre is headed by Professor Nynke van den Broek, who has been leading research and technical assistance work in the area of Maternal and Newborn Health for over 25 years.

Historically, CMNH's website was separate, but CMNH wanted to be more closely integrated to benefit from the rebuild of the main LSTM site. We proposed developing a template website that ALL LSTM Centres could use to allow each Centre to have control of its identity and content but also be able to share and link content with the main LSTM site. CMNH led the way and came to us to work out the best way to sit CMNH within LSTM, with a few caveats.

Same same, but different.

In moving CMNH’s presence from their own site to a micro site within LSTM, it was important to maintain CMNH’s own sense of identity.

To do so without creating a confusing experience for a user (imagine clicking on the CMNH link to be taken to a site that looks completely different to LSTM) was a balancing act – we settled for some palette changes but the design and styling is in keeping with LSTM.

Tackling partitioned content management

An important feature of the CMNH site is the way CMNH have a roped off area in which to mange their own content. CMNH web editors also have the ability to share content between the centre and the main LSTM site.

Articles from CMNH that have warrant visibility on the LSTM site can be featured on the main site, CMNH can select relevant items from the LSTM site to be displayed within CMNH, with signposts to let the user know the source of any page.

Variety, flexibility, compromise.

CMNH work across a variety of projects and themes, so needed a content mangement system (CMS) with the flexibility to display differing information and relationships available for pages with a mixture of requirements. We created a standard content page which can cater to this range of needs.

There's a trade off - giving one template a great deal of manual flexibility is an alternative to a more automated system. More templates, each dealing with a different requirement, creates a more consistent way of linking between certain types of pages. While web editors need to exercise caution when dealing with this amount of flexibility, we look after our web editors at Manta Ray, making sure they're happy and confident when using their CMS.

Diderik van Halsema
Director of Communications
LSTM

I can't recommend working with Manta Ray Media highly enough! The process around the development of LSTM's new website was smooth; professional; realistic; pragmatic and knowledgeable.

Manta Ray knows the academic & global health sector as no other, which is extremely useful as they are able to translate general ideas into specific products.