Award-winning media
An aged and community care provider has beaten the rest of the world to recieve ‘Best in Class’.
By Lillian Radulova
A new website for Victorian based aged care provider, Jewish Care has taken out top honours in an international web media awards.
Its website won the ‘Best in Class’ Interactive Media Award under the “Community” category, organised by Interactive Media Council Inc. (IMC), a New York based non-profit organisation of leading web related professionals.
Ayal Tusia, Jewish Cares’ marketing and communication manager who managed the nine month project says that an organisations’ website is critical to how it communicates with its community.
“It’s critical that an organisation has a top quality website which represents it in its best possible light. It becomes the public face of the organisation… in this day and age the way we communicate to the community is not like it used to be, we all understand that, if anyone needs to know anything it’s found online.” Mr Tusia said.
“From a community point of view, our website is the front door to Jewish Care in terms of our online presence. It’s our way of getting all our messages to the Victorian community and essentially the world.”
The awards are designed to recognise ‘the highest standards of excellence in website design and development’ while providing recognition to individuals and organisations for their efforts. Judgement criteria included design, content, functionality, usability, standards compliance and cross-browser compatibility.
“It’s a hundred steps ahead of our previous website and includes so much information for people. It provides who we are, who our people are, and it’s portal where anyone can come and see photos of event, our calendar, news and media pages, download brochures and annual reports, view videos, find jobs that are available at not just Jewish Care but also at our employment and training service. You can make suggestions, refer friends and donate online to Jewish Care.” Mr Tusia said.
According to Mr Tusia, functionality and accessibility features such as the ability to increase font sizes and big buttons are important characteristics of the new website, meaning anyone in the community can easily navigate their way around, regardless of any visual impairment. This concept aimed to make it more accessible for elderly users, and this scored highly on the judging panels’ review.
“It has to be easy for people to navigate and not get lost. It’s also important we look at how the community might be looking for information, so we use basic understandable English rather than industry lingo and acronyms. We also built the navigation and menu so there are multiple ways to find information, it doesn’t assume everyone uses the same method to find it,” Mr Tusia said.
Bill Appleby, Jewish Care CEO, said there had been 73 entries submitted under the ‘Community’ category from organisations around the globe.
“This award is a wonderful achievement and validates the work of our dedicated staff at Jewish Care who continually strives to improve all that we do to support our community,” he said.
