A Public Health website. Accessible, multi-language, and packed with advice and resources to educate and inspire.

Across all the national health statistics Slough sadly scores below average throughout: “Life expectancy is 6.5 years lower for men and 4.1 years lower for women in the most deprived areas of Slough.” [SBC RFQ document]

But all is not lost. Slough Borough Council and specifically the Public Health Division is on a mission to make a difference. At the hub of this drive is the Public Health Slough website, designed to help educate and inspire the people of Slough to take personal responsibility for their health; and to make lasting positive changes to their wellbeing.

From children to parents, young adults to older citizens, this website had to be visually accessible to almost everyone in the borough. Added to this, the source for much of the website content was coming from national campaigns. All with their own branding and graphics (e.g. Change4Life and OneYou). We created a consistent and flexible design system that could carry all of this luggage.

We needed to ensure that anyone landing on this website would be able to relate to the faces they were seeing. To feel as if these people represented their community. To feel understood. However, there was a very low budget available for photography so we invested many late hours working our magic with stock images selecting candid photographs that felt like they were of real people. A key function of the website was to create a search tool that enabled our users to find health-related activities – and to get Slough moving! Using Google Maps provided our solution to the display challenges, including Geocoding the visitors’ locality to display the activity location markers on the map.

We created the website navigation and messaging in the first person: ‘I’d like to lose weight’. To do this within their budget, we ran a live shared tech-spec document throughout the project. This was achieved through a two-way channel for frank and honest technical conversations — shaping, moulding, and sculpting the project together.

You can view the live website here: www.publichealthslough.co.uk