York Multimedia has developed suite of websites, extranet systems, intranet systems and administration tools designed to help the UK’s Sector Skills Councils to put their projects and activities online easily and painlessly.

 YMN initially worked extensively with skillfast-uk and with other cross-sector partnerships to develop systems which both help run their internal processes and also maximise external visibility of their programmes. YMN then made these products and systems available to other SSCs.

 ‘The Big Push’, for example, is designed to assist SSCs to work with employers towards the completion of a Sector Skills Agreement. From enabling businesses to sign up for an interview, through to enabling feedback on a series of proposals and initiatives, the site allows the SSC to carefully manage the process, and control when each phase of the project is adopted. The system also allows different sub-sectors to move at different speeds through the process.

 Another tool developed is ‘Catapult’ which is a single-central web-based contacts database and email list manager. Integrating with website subsrciption pages and other databases, it enables you to easily compose professional-looking formatted email newsletters, and issue them to specific recipient sets.

 Add to this the ‘Contact Manager’ which enables you to record all communication with businesses and associated organisations, and view at a glance who has said what to whom, and you’ll be starting to make sense of all those people and groups you are dealing with.

 But this is just the start. Websites and systems dealing with schools, careers, and competitions all form part of the suite of integrated products. As do CD-Rom based products, ranging from interactive educational games for schoolchildren, to business tools to aid the completion of application forms, Training Needs Analyses, and business plans.

Putting you in control

We believe that you should have full control over all of the content on your websites, databases and other systems. We also believe that you shouldn’t have to get a degree in computer sciences to be able to modify your content.

So everything we do for our clients comes with an intuitive, easy-to-use Content Management System (CMS). If you know how access the internet using a web browser, you can quickly and simply manage your websites and online content.

Adding or editing text is as easy as using Microsoft Word - you can even paste in Word documents and retain formatting, tables etc. Adding images is simply a case of pointing to an image file on your computer or CD, and the system does the rest - resizing, reformatting, optimising - invisibly and instantly! And for directories or mailing lists, bulk imports are simple and straightforward.

But putting it in is only half of it. Exporting your online content for other uses - whether to publish a booklet, distribute an e-newsletter, or whatever you want to do, is only a few clicks away. 
Ask York Multimedia for a CMS demo.

Integrating your systems 

If there’s one thing that really winds people up, it’s trying to keep information up to date in lots of different places - websites, intranets, email lists, directories, calendars etc etc. We all know that what happens in practice is that it never gets done properly, lists get out of synch, and sorting it all out is one of those jobs that never quite gets to the top of the list.

The beauty of the York Multimedia solution is that you have just one place to store all your data, but lots of different ways of using and presenting it. A single address book change propagates across websites, intranets, emailing lists and directories.

For example, looking at the products above, a company might visit your corporate website (6) and register an interest in one of your projects. So when your next e-newsletter goes out from Catapult (3) they’ll be sure to receive it, and as a result decide to get involved in your Sector Skills Agreement consultation. So they go the the Big Push website (10) and find they’re already on there, and have their say on a few issues. So you decide to send someone to visit them, and record details of the meeting and actions arising on the contact manager (7). Next the offer to help with your schools outreach programme (8), but need to recruit someone for this so use your careers and training website (5). 

And so it goes on - all your systems working together, avoiding duplication of effort, and recording a communications trail which anyone you authorise can follow.

Alternatively you can download the latest edition of our PDF newsletter for SSCs, here.

We look forward to helping you take your projects forward, efficiently and professionally!