Stroke4Carers
Stroke4Carers is a website designed for unpaid stroke carers, family and friends of anyone affected by stroke illness. The website has over 340 pages of content and uses interactive graphics, animations, film clips and quizzes so that the information is interesting and easy to use. Many of the pages have links to other useful sites, printable checklists and useful contacts for further local and national information.
Project Background
It has been developed by Chest Heart & Stroke Scotland (CHSS), The National Advisory Committee for Stroke, The University of Edinburgh Learning Technology Section (LTS) and The Big Lottery Fund Scotland. This project marks our 4th year of successful collaboration with CHSS.
Technical Overview
The site was constructed by LTS using WordPress, an open source content management system built on PHP and MySQL. Although WordPress is mainly utilised as a blogging tool, it offers a great degree of flexibility and was easily customised by LTS to create a bespoke VLE. The built-in commenting features of WordPress lend themselves nicely to a review process, and throughout the authoring phase each page of content was regularly reviewed by a group of 30 reviewers and contributors. During this phase more than 1000 comments were collected creating an effective collaborative working environment. This allowed contributors to shape the content of the site, in their own time and without having to attend lengthy review meetings.
Official Launch
The website will be officially launched at the UK Stroke Forum at the SECC Glasgow, 29th November to 1st December.
Project URL
Gallery
Associated URL
Chest Heart & Stroke Scotland
The National Advisory Committee for Stroke
The Big Lottery Fund Scotland
Photograph courtesy of Chest Heart & Stroke Scotland.
