Cogges is a lovely old manor house and farm which sits beside the Windrush River. It was in the process of transition from being run by the County Council to an independent Trust. We were asked to manage their website for them. The website is an important part of Cogges especially as much of the site is closed whilst the Trust embarks on revitalising it. They needed a way to both communicate to the public but also get the public involved. This was particularly important for their Schools Programme which involved artists working with school children in new media on the site. They wanted to be able to share experiences, photos and videos between schools. All of this content had to be hosted on and served from the Cogges site to allow schools to access it from within their firewalls. We worked closely with the Cogges team to develop a suitably easy and attractive solution. The site now has

• A schools area including a blog for schools to share content. The blog is easy enough for children to edit themselves and load photos onto.
• A video player which plays films made at Cogges with the resident film artist.
• The ability for schools to comment on each others work and follow up via the site
• A community forum which can be used for any topics the site editors choose to focus on and to which members of the public can register and share their ideas
• A news area to which interesting news about the site can be published. This feeds automatically to the front page
• Email newsletters for the public which are easy to edit and which link back into content on the site

Olamalu also helped create imagery for the site including little line drawings to make the schools area more interesting and fun.