Textile Conservation Centre

The Textile Conservation Centre is sadly closing on October 30th 2009. To mark this closure and the 30+ years of legacy work that the Centre has carried out, we were only too pleased to donate our time and services in delivering a fantastic website that could present the work, the history and some of the future news of the Centre and its staff.

The challenge for Five Mile and the Textile Conservation Centre (TCC) was to find a way that time-stretched staff could carry out the long process of bringing together content for a legacy website in a collaborative fashion. At the same time, we needed to be sure that we could carry out the work needed to build and design the site without getting in the way of this creative process.

Drupal offered all the answers. By providing the TCC with a skeleton installation of Drupal that was optimised for busy staff to rapidly and easily deploy text and related images our web design and web development tasks were able to be carried out along side the site build process. The site was a collaborative effort and the process really worked well.

The Front Page

As well as having a piece of content that introduces the purpose of the site, the front page is a great example in how we like to provide easy to use tools for promoting content. Nearly all the copy on the front page is dynamic. Featured pages and news stories can easily be deployed and promoted without any fuss.

The Design

Our goal with the design and layout was to produce a look that fitted exactly with the subject matter, without interrupting the ease of use. There is quite a bit of content in the site and we made sure we used space in what we believe are the right ways to keep the content to be enjoyable to use.

Obviously, as a legacy website, images are vital and the presentation of images is intended to be usable, enjoyable and useful in terms of referencing the subjects they cover.

We wish the staff of the TCC every bit of luck as they move on with their careers and we thank them for giving us the opportunity to have worked with them on this enjoyable project.

www.textileconservationcentre.co.uk