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Building a portal to draw together organisations who can benefit from business support.

Background

Throughout London and the South East of England there are many organisations that are set up to assist businesses.
Often business people are unaware that such services exist and that there is government support and often grants available. There was an opportunity to bring these people together through an online collaborative tool.

Challenge

The key aim of this programming project was to provide a simple way for people looking for business support to:

Understand what support is provided and available
Be able to search for the kind of assistance they need (such as funding or marketing assistance)
Use the web to be able to visualise where those services are provided
a one-stop specialised search engine that would show all of the available options in one place and provide a jumping off point.
Additionally the project owners also want to understand what people are looking for so that they can better target the services they have
Simple editing of web page content as well as entering the locations. Free from developer involvement
Gather details of the people interacting with the site to communicate with them later.

GIS application developed using googlemaps

Screen layout of the finished project

Solution

traditional text based search was certainly a possibility here. However when searching for an organisation close by, a map places the location in-context very quickly Early on we evaluated a number of different mapping solutions available online. For technical and cost reasons we chose Google Maps as our preferred platform.
Google Maps has a programming interface (API) that allows developers to present their own data sets superimposed on top of a map.

Outcome

The initial brief was taken from a "is is possible to" conversation, we discussed with the client what they were looking to achieve and suggested some of the considerations and options available. We then received a brief detailing what the client required.
Having discussed the project beforehand we were also able to understand "the spirit" of the project and where they were looking to go in the future.
Our initial deelopment proposal included

Sample screen designs so that our client could understand our ideas and comment early on
feature functions that we would propose, what was of primary importance and also useful enhancements
A timeline of when the project could be delivered
Indicative pricing. Including areas where cost could be saved by changing the requirement, and otional pieces that would add further value