We have partnered with the Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health (ACAMH) since 2018.  During that time we’ve redesigned and migrated their website to a new platform, created new evidence-based content and helped to embed evidence-based processes.

Background

ACAMH is a professional membership organisation that publishes the top two journals in Child and Adolescent Mental Health (CAMH).  They also provide world-leading educational courses supported by a detailed website with over 1,000 articles.

Design

ACAMH were looking for a revamp of their website design.  They came to us with a logo and outline brand design, which we extended and applied to the website.  We worked with users to establish optimum ways of presenting different types of information.  We also focused on supporting the membership offering, by starting to include interactive elements, regular blogs, a personalised home page and social media links.

The new design also had some important technical boundaries:  compliance with the new (2018) W3C Accessibility criteria and design that is responsive to new technology, especially smartphones.

Content

We supported the relaunch of the new-look website by creating high-impact, evidence-based content to be showcased as Topic Guides.

These landing pages are optimised for keyword searching.  They provide users with an overview of each topic and link to the latest content in these areas.

We developed the format in consultation with end-users, and commissioned the content from our network of contacts.  All content was reviewed prior to publication.  ACAMH has since gone on to commission its own Topic Guides, like this one on Bullying, without the need for our assistance.

Building functionality with APIs

As an international organisation with thousands of members, ACAMH needs to stay on top of communications.  So we had to build a website that talks seamlessly with their Customer Relationship Management, Event Management and payment platforms.

This benefits the website as we now offer a personalised website experience based on members’ preferences that allows them to access their learning history and professional development certificates.

We build this functionality using an Application Processing Interface (API) that connects to the third party platforms.  We also use APIs to integrate access to online journal subscriptions via a third party publisher, and to deposit important website content in a Digital Object Identifier library (CrossRef).

In the works

We have been working on a taxonomy of CAMH information needs which will be rolled out soon.

We are also collaborating with ACAMH on producing ACAMH Learn, an open access online learning library, which will be released soon after.