Kai Tiaki Nursing New Zealand

Kai Tiaki homepage - December 2021

Website: kaitiaki.org.nz (site has since been modified) - view screenshots

Size: monthly 50-page journal published in WordPress

My professional status: web consultant with The Hive Creative

Website client: New Zealand Nurses Organisation

Dates: June 2016 - June 2019 and December 2019 - March 2022

Categories: Content designer, Front-end developer, Writing for the web, Content-loader, Webmaster, Responsive web design/dev, CSS-based layout, CSS3, HTML5, e-govt/WCAG compliance, WordPress, Large sites

Brief: The New Zealand Nurses Organisation is a workers' union representing more than 55,000 nurses and health workers, and is the leading professional body of nurses in Aotearoa New Zealand. They first approached The Hive Creative in 2016, asking for advice on how best to convert their monthly printed journal, Kai Tiaki Nursing New Zealand, into an online PDF for members.

Over the next few years we met with the Kai Tiaki team every few months, while they mulled over the options we presented them with. A simple online PDF, a flip-book PDF, a news website like Stuff and an issue-based WordPress website were all demonstrated, discussed, scoped and quoted for. We also ran a half-day workshop in July 2018 to help them progress in their decision-making.

In December 2019 we were given the go-ahead to design, build and content-load an issue-based WordPress site that mirrored the print version of the journal. The latest issue would be uploaded to the site and published each month at the same time as the print version came out. The website would be accessible via login to members, with the news articles accessible to everyone. Subscriber institutions would have an IP address-based login system for their employees.

I was responsible for the selection and re-styling of the WordPress theme and associated plugins, CSS3, some PHP wrangling, building the site, site hosting management, browser and device testing, content design - writing help pages and technical documentation, QA and client support; and content-loading, web editing and proof-reading for the first year of publication.

Achievements:

  • Got this project over the line after literally years of encouraging the NZNO to make a decision about what they wanted. I think it's one of the longest projects I've been involved with, although for the majority of the time we were waiting, rather than working
  • Replicated Rory's lovely design exactly by adding my own set of CSS stylesheets to the build, and extending these styles for page layout and customised formatting to match the needs of each new issue
  • Produced an absolutely beautiful and pixel-perfect online journal every month for the first year of publication, getting everything done exactly right, following my very comprehensive style guide for the editing team, and making sure every macron was in place, every t crossed and i dotted
  • Published the online issue just a day or so after the print edition went out to members each month. Busy times!

My responsibilities included:

  • Initially providing the NZNO team with information and working examples of online PDFs, flipbook PDFs and other digital options in the early stages of the project
  • Attending various meetings with NZNO and the Kai Tiaki team, presenting them with these various options and talking through potential solutions
  • Planning and then running a half-day workshop for NZNO in July 2018 to help them progress in their decision-making
  • As The Hive Creative's web consultant, providing Hive CEO Chris Payne with feedback on his proposal/solution documents to the Kai Tiaki team, including the one that was accepted by the team in December 2019
  • Once we had project sign-off - researching a range of potential WordPress themes to find ones that suited the functional requirements of Kai Tiaki, and selecting the best of these
  • Researching a range of WordPress plugins to find one that would enable us to create an issue-based magazine-style website (surprisingly difficult, and not something that comes as standard with a WordPress install) - IssueM/LeakyPaywall
  • Installing and setting up the WordPress instance on my managed webhost account, and managing hosting from then on
  • Reskinning the look and feel of the website theme and updating the CSS to match the very lovely design provided by Rory Harnden at Hive
  • Tweaking various PHP files within the IssueM plugin to extend its capabilities and get stuff displaying how I wanted it
  • Building the "proof of concept" website using our reskinned WordPress theme, populating it with content from the most recently-published printed issue of the journal
  • Formatting some quite complex pages of content (generally the monthly features and nursing training pages) which included responsive tables, pullquotes, multi-column layouts and other highlighted blocks of special content - and creating new CSS styles to use with these as required
  • Figuring out the best responsive behaviour and creating a new set of styles each time a table was used to display tabular data in an article (each one was unique)
  • Ensuring that macrons were used correctly - as the journal copy included many instances where Māori words and phrases were used
  • Hard-coding a "classifieds" page that was updated each month to accompany the new issue
  • Setting up a "past issues" section of the website through which members could continue to access older issues of Kai Tiaki
  • Working alongside Ian Leader from Kea Software who was tasked with helping us to get the membership login system set up and sorted with the LeakyPaywall plugin - using the 50,000-strong NZNO member list as our starting-point and including IP address lookups for institutional subscribers with employees who needed to access Kai Tiaki
  • Improving accessibility and WCAG 2.0 compliance of the original WordPress theme and the IssueM plugin
  • Improving the responsive behaviour and functionality of the original WordPress theme
  • Providing a print stylesheet for the website, with a "print" button on each page
  • Carrying out very thorough cross-browser and mobile device testing (for screen and print) using a combination of real devices and BrowserStack virtual ones
  • Content design and writing the help text page for members to walk them through the signup and login processes
  • Liaising with the Kai Tiaki print publishing team in order to obtain the best quality photos for the website version, preferably uncropped originals, as their house style for the print version was super-tight cropping, and ours was not
  • Liaising with the NZNO's advertising salesperson, specifying the dimensions and digital quality that we would need for advertising in Kai Tiaki using the AdvancedAds plugin
  • Using the Content Aware Sidebars plugin to enable us to include advertising in the sidebar on pages with sufficient content, and setting up individual ads each month which would then be displayed in a random order on specified pages
  • Writing a comprehensive content-loading "HowTo" technical document for Chris, Rory and myself, as we shared the content-loading of each issue once the proof of concept site was finished and approved by the Kai Tiaki team, and I wanted us to get everything spot-on, completely consistent, and exactly right each time
  • Proof-reading each issue in its entirety before publication
  • Working as a team with Chris and Rory, content-loading Kai Tiaki each month for the first year, publishing each issue just a day or so after the printed version was mailed out to members.

Kai Tiaki responsive screens in various devices

The NZNO does such an important job of looking after the interests of their members - who are dedicated nurses, midwives, students, kaimahi hauora, health care workers and allied health professionals - and this was a project a very long time in the making.

I think the end product was well worth the wait, and I love Rory's design - it's quite beautiful, and super-easy to read, and provides an excellent backdrop for the very interesting articles inside. The print publishing team began using elements of Rory's web design in the print design of the journal a couple of months after our proof of concept website was first published, so I think they liked it too.

Sadly, due to ever-increasing postage and printing costs, the final paper issue of Kai Tiaki Nursing New Zealand was printed in December 2021, after 113 continuous years of publication. From then on, it became an online-only journal.

At the same time, the Kai Tiaki publishing team took over the monthly content-loading tasks which Chris, Rory and I had shared for the previous year. As they have modified the site quite extensively since then, having decided they weren't as keen on the issue-based structure as they thought they were, I have included screenshots of the final issue we were in charge of. This more closely reflects our original design, the care we took in getting everything right, and the high design standards and consistency of layout that we maintained.

The publication has since been renamed "Kaitiaki" as this is the correct te reo Māori spelling for "guardian" or "caregiver".