Our Customers

University of Edinburgh

Challenge

After amassing thousands of websites over the years, the University of Edinburgh’s estate had grown fragmented, characterised by few standards, resulting in a highly variable user experience and a large amount of unknowns – particularly around compliance with accessibility, privacy and security policy.

We needed to better understand our web estate. With Little Forest’s help, we started to track down site owners, and to audit and understand the technology base. Little Forest gave our information a home and provided a number of tools to help us better understand and classify it.

Solution

As our needs have changed – such with the recent changes in accessibility legislation – Little Forest have been flexible and helped us generate new insights and reports, and have supported us in delivering workshops to our devolved editors, helping them move towards compliance.

Little Forest’s proactive, can-do approach has been an enormous help, and we look forward to working with them for years to come.

Jonathan Trout

Head of Web Strategy, University of Edinburgh

University of Sunderland

Challenge

As more of our services than ever move online, our digital services have become the face of the University. To manually audit these would have been an impossible task. With the focus on accessibility legislation, the University saw an opportunity to not only improve standards compliance but to audit all of our services to keep track of content quality, performance, and visitor behaviour to improve the user experience.

Solution

The Web Team used the content and accessibility tools available in LittleForest to monitor our digital services. The results of this gave them the insight needed to firstly improve accessibility to comply with the WCAG standards. It also enabled them to review content quality and identify content that was not helpful to end-users. In collaboration with Little Forest, they also helped our devolved web community improve the accessibility of their websites. Through workshops, guidance, and training in automated testing tools helping us develop a roadmap showing how and when we plan to improve accessibility.

The tools and features available within LittleForest – offer excellent value. Using these tools gives us the information we need to work through issues and errors in order to improve the experience for all our website visitors.

Dean Hale

Web Development Manager, University of Sunderland

Middlesex University

Challenge

Middlesex University London is firmly committed to accessibility and inclusion; we want to be a community where everyone feels welcome. In 2019, we knew about the upcoming accessibility legislation – however, with a sprawling digital estate and limited resource to commit to the work, we didn’t really know where to start. We knew we needed to perform audits, generate accessibility statements, contact third party suppliers, and we also knew we needed to try and get as much done as possible before the 23 September 2020 deadline. It seemed like an overwhelming task, and so what we needed most of all was direction, and advice on approach. You could say, we couldn’t see the Little Forest for the trees!

Solution

We first learned of Little Forest’s work through a presentation by the University of Edinburgh at the IWMW 2019 conference. We immediately saw that they had been in a similar boat, with a huge digital estate that they wanted to rein in, and that with Little Forest’s help they made massive strides towards improved web governance. We therefore reached out to Little Forest ourselves, who were amazingly friendly and eager to help. Since then, we’ve achieved so much. Little Forest have performed audits of our many microsites, with the platform unearthing many insights we’d never have otherwise known; helped us adopt a framework through which to produce and obtain accessibility statements; and continue to offer invaluable ongoing advice. Gavin Colborne sits as an external member of our Accessibility Working Group, and has been a brilliant source of knowledge and help. With Little Forest’s support, we put together a successful online event for Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2020 to raise internal awareness of accessibility, and are now working on rolling out training and info sessions open to all staff. When 23 September 2020 came around, we felt confident we were in a good place. Little Forest remains an important part of our accessibility efforts, and our programme of continuous improvement keeps developing every day.

Little Forest helped us shape and establish a robust programme of continuous improvement. We’ve even been told that our work in collecting third-party system accessibility statements is sector-leading, and we’d never have done it without Little Forest.

Swéta Rana

Web Manager, Middlesex University

CivicConnect

Challenge

CivicConnect needed to audit the accessibility of over 35 different websites, including reporting errors, analysing the types of errors, instructing where to find and how to fix the errors, and prioritising issues for multiple web teams of content owners, designers and developers.

Solution

The Little Forest Index tool provided CivicConnect with a way to automatically scan multiple websites for errors, and adjust the scans based on each site's CMS for more efficient reports. Once the scans were complete, they were able to export accessibility issues that included helpful details such as the location in the code, affected WCAG Criteria and technique(s) plus descriptions on how to approach fixing the problems. Using all the information, CivicConnect was able to create both high-level visual reports as well as detailed spreadsheets for managers. While automated tools can only catch so many accessibility errors in the code, the Little Forest tool was able to flag code, as Warnings and Notices, that either needed a second look at the design or content, or required a manual test of the functionality. This extra bit of guidance provided next steps for the website teams. And as the project progressed and changed, the dashboards were customised with new features and functionality to fit CivicConnect's needs.

The best part of using Little Forest is the extra service of the team members who went above and beyond the needs of our project.

Tiina Vuorenmaa

Senior UX/UI Designer, CivicConnect

University of East London (UEL)

Challenge

We bought Little Forest into UEL IT to stabilise and improve the overall performance of uel.ac.uk and the Sitecore Content Management System (CMS).

The website had monthly web outages when Editors published content, and the CMS was almost totally unusable. The website had a poor internal reputation for being overly complex and in IT we received daily complaints from across the University. The CMS was inconsistent and there was a large backlog of new requirements waiting to be delivered.

Solution

The Little Forest team initially spent some time investigating the major issues, prioritising these based on severity and gathering information from across key parts of the University to gain a full picture. They very quickly took control of a heavily customised and highly unstable website. Little Forest were able to implement some of the required technical fixes including the two major blockers, the CMS usability and the regular web outages, in a matter of months. These were two highly complex challenges that required patience and tenacity and excellent technical acumen. It is hard to explain in a few paragraphs the level of technical expertise needed to fix these. It took much expertise, perseverance and persistence. This paid dividends when the Editors were able to freely edit and publish regular content without the fear of an outage. This quickly established trust and a good rapport again with our Marketing colleagues. In addition to this, the Little Forest team built good relationships with their internal IT colleagues. This relationship had been previously damaged by a silo working mentality. Little Forest were open and transparent in the work they were doing which has helped form an excellent team ethos across the IT department in relation to the website. They shared knowledge and learnings and this has created a healthy and productive working culture. They very quickly were able to move into an agile way of working (Scrum) and, despite many setbacks thrown at them along the way, always delivered what was required. These setbacks were often substantial and yet they still dealt with these with a positive attitude and a good sense of humour. We have carried on working with the Little Forest team well beyond the original contract dates because we have been so satisfied with their work. Not just on the technical side, but also in terms of winning back the trust of senior colleagues across the University and because the team often go the extra mile as ‘standard’. The broad skill set at Little Forest HQ means that I also often call upon them for advice and guidance on broader web issues related to accessibility, SEO and web governance. This has been invaluable to our Marketing team and to IT as we have learned much from them.

Little Forest are my go-to technical advisors. I trust them implicitly and have enjoyed working with them enormously. The team is motivated, bright, and incredibly capable. Just when I think something is impossible, they manage to find a way of making it work. How they do that is something I will never understand!

Fiona Harrison

Web Manager, University of East London (UEL)

Azets

Challenge

Azets is running 12 websites covering 6 countries and several brands. Keeping content quality like proofreading, out-dated text and SEO basics up-to-date is a challenge. We have previously used other tools to work on this, but we felt that using several tools to handle this became expensive and confusing for the marketing teams. In addition, we were looking for a tool that could help with continuous and automatic content audit, to help us keep content published and maintained according to business goals and our editorial calendar.

Solution

Little Forest is creating weekly reports to keep the web editors and corporate marketing informed about the content quality status. The reports make it easy and fun to benchmark the status of content quality across the sites. This is used in our monthly status meetings to discuss tasks that should be solved for the next meeting. When we started our discussion with Little Forest they didn’t have the necessary features to run the content audits we requested. However, within a few months they had updated their system to be able to generate reports on all urls with the possibility to tag them with keywords and generate alerts for updates.

Not only do Little Forest integrate several content quality tools in one solution. They are very open to suggestions for improvements and new features to the tool.

Tor André Wigmostad

Digital Manager, Azets

Oxfam

Challenge

We had just transferred our old website onto WordPress, this caused lots of problems with; broken links, missing titles and missing metadata. Essentially, we were starting from scratch. We needed a platform which could audit the new website for SEO performance, send crawlers and easily track down our broken links, PDFs and images. Not only that, but we had to plan for when New Zealand adapts the new accessibility requirements, which is why we chose Little Forest.

Solution

Little Forest is an easy platform to use and understand. Anything you do not know how to do, there is always help on hand, (they even help you outside of their work hours to fit in with our time zone). We went from hundreds of broken links to none, which significantly improved our overall SEO score. Our website is now ranking on search engines and getting a lot more traffic to the site.

Little Forest is an easy platform to use and understand. With regular reports hitting your inbox, you get a ranking on how your website is performing and how you can better optimise your website for a great experience and lead generation.

Xavier Hartstonge

Digital Communications Lead, Oxfam

MRM Germany

Challenge

Technology is constantly changing and so are the needs of our clients, we needed a tool which would not only monitor the full web estates of our clients consisting of dozens or even hundreds of sites, but that would also adapt its technology to meet the growing digital requirements, we as a digital agency would be faced with.

Solution

Little Forest over the last few years have provided us with service and support of the highest standard. From custom product enhancements to our monthly catch-up calls and regular group training sessions they have created a community of users within the organization who are active and motivated to make change. With new European accessibility guidelines having come into place in September, we had the added challenge of helping our clients move towards the AA WCAG requirements. Little Forests monitoring was already in place to target these errors helping us to understand what the individual sites challenges were and demonstrate progress. We have rolled out monitoring across every site for one of major clients and hope to continue growing and using the platform even more moving forwards.

As a Global Digital Agency we work with lots of technology suppliers but Little Forest has to be a favourite - we love the tool & the service is unbeatable.

Hannes Waegner

Grouphead Content Operations, MRM Germany

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