Hampshire Gateway

Hampshire Gateway is very powerful events listings site - Listing over a 1000 entries a month, which could be a daunting task, but with the filtering enabled through the semantic structure it becomes easy to find what you are looking for. All the site functionality is achieved using MW and SMW extensions and coding.

It has been designed and developed through consultation with parents to provide a gateway to recreation and leisure for disabled children and young people who may require additional support to access opportunities within their communities.

Administrative tasks are all taken care of in the content management system, where there are reports, the ability to load site information including blogs with multi-tiered administrative layers as well as automated features such as ‘What’s new’, ‘Did you know’ and slide shows. New information once approved automatically goes to the right place on the site keeping the administration overhead down.

Activities have the capability to be searched and filtered by area, provider, type (dance, sport etc) and there is also the ability to search for activities within a distance of your location. Being date driven the old events are automatically removed from the views, again reducing admin time.

As well as events there is detailed information on the activity providers, and all the activities that are made available by them are viewable separately in the providers listings.

A new SRF Filtered format was implemented to allow results to be instantly filtered by distance (see screenshot left).

As the data set is very large, the biggest challenge was optimising the speed of data return and filtering. The SRF Filtered code was optimised gaining a 10 fold speed increase.

The look and feel of the site was very important as many of the users have disabilities. A custom skin was created which is fully W3C compliant.

The site has proved very popular, averaging 50,000 visits per month.