College of Early Childhood Educators SharePoint 2010 Public Website

"I Envision... a fresh, appealing site that provides all the information needed to members and the public, with room for future growth.”

The Client

The College of Early Childhood Educators (CECE) is a professional self-regulatory body for early childhood educators formed to protect the public interest and focused on quality and standards in the practice of early childhood education. It is the first self-regulatory college for early childhood educators in Canada. Only members of the College can use the title “early childhood educator” (ECE) or “registered early childhood educator (RECE) to describe themselves or their profession.

The Challenge

The College of Early Childhood Educators  registered over 20,000 members in its first year of operation from September 2008-2009, and this figure jumped to approximately 28,000 by the end of the second year.  The College’s original website provided general information as well as specific procedures for interaction with the College. The site’s existing content management system was not providing its expected benefits, and it was decided that SharePoint 2010, with its scalability and high degree of functionality, would be the replacement platform of choice. Envision IT was contracted to develop a new site for the College using a SharePoint 2010 publishing portal template.

The Solution

Although the College wanted to maintain a similar look and feel for the new website, Envision IT’s creative resources brought a bright, fresh look to the site with clean lines and simple navigation to enhance user experience. Site visitors to www.college-ece.ca  start off at the splash page with a language selector, then they are taken to the home page for the language of choice.  The bilingual site uses standard SharePoint variations to create a French site that mirrors the English. On the home page, the Envision IT Image Rotator provides visual appeal while redirecting visitors to various pages of interest. The text-size manipulator enhances user accessibility, and end-user training by Envision IT ensured that content authors keep pages to a manageable size and so avoid undue scrolling and unacceptable load times. The Envision IT Video Player allows visitors to watch video recordings of past Annual Meetings of Members, with video embedded and playing right in the page content.

Content Query Web Parts display the latest news pages on the home page, and embedded video adds to the social appeal of the site. It is expected that the site will be expanded in the future to include a Members Portal component, but right now the site provides all the necessary information to the public, the College’s existing and renewing members.

“I was asked to present the new website to our Council yesterday and I’m so happy to tell you that they LOVED it! We received very positive feedback... It was a huge day for us in Communications!”

The Results

• A fully-functional bilingual website where members and the public can find all the information they need about the College
• A fresh, new look to the site that complies with its image and professionalism
• A site that is easy for non-technical contributors to maintain
• Standard permission workflows ensure that approvals are met in a timely fashion
• Use of metadata contributes to efficient search of text and documents throughout the site and supports external search engine optimization