In My Shoes
Background
The City of Whittlesea is one of the most culturally diverse areas of Melbourne, one of the world's great multicultural cities.
"In My Shoes" is the website which is part of the Intercultural Diversity Project, an innovative joint initiative of community partners in the City of Whittlesea. These partners include the City of Whittlesea, Centre for Multicultural Youth Issues (CMYI), Kildonan UnitingCare, Lalor North Secondary College, Latrobe University's Centre for Dialogue, Peter Lalor Secondary College, School Focused Youth Service (SFYS), Vocal Local and Whittlesea Community Connections. For its kind, at local level in Australia at least, the website is believed to be somewhat of a first.
Datalink was chosen to build the website as an extension of the Youth Whittlesea website, with the two programs intended to be interlinked.
Solution
The website essentially showcases the experiences of young people in Whittlesea and their various cultural backgrounds. The aim was to promote diversity and one way of doing this is through the voices of youth. The brief was that it was important to maintain a degree of anonymity for the youth, particularly due to privacy. So the metaphor of feet and youth voices was one way of achieving this, inviting users to "Follow the Footsteps" of the individual life yourneys of each young person. The site also had to avoid the common cliches of multiculturalism such as "flags and food".
An exploratory style of navigation was chosen to enhance the experience and to give a balanced exposure to the different profiles on the site by randomly choosing a profile to view. The profiles with sound and streaming multimedia (MP3) soundbites are featured. The rest were intended to be like an online cultural museum or gallery.
As well as the interactive profiles, the website also features other interactive templates including an online contact form and the website is able to be maintained by non-technical editors using Datalink's Freestyler.
With the success of the program, future stages are planned to expand the information about the program and enhance the website with video and other content.
Datalink Products
Datalink Services
- Professional Website Design
- Information Architecture Consulting
- Implementation of a Content Management System
- Programming (PHP4, MySQL, DHTML, XML, XHTML, CSS)
- CMS Editor training
- Content entry and copywriting
Technologies
- Red Hat Linux
- Apache
