Sport Universities North East England (SUNEE) sees online visits triple

New website for North East England sporting education partnership sees online visits triple.

Sport Universities North East England (SUNEE), a collaboration of the region’s five universities, has launched a new website.

The website has already tripled its number of visitors and has played a significant part in boosting awareness about the initiative. 

Acting as a one-stop shop, www.sportuniversitiesneengland.org.uk/ provides accessible information about the not-for-profit collaboration and how interested parties can get involved. 

“Sport has an extremely important role to play in the lives of hundreds of people across the region,” said Tracey Tait, the project manager at SUNEE. “It is crucial to the success of a number of national agendas including health and wellness, social inclusion and crime reduction.”

The not-for-profit organisation, which is a collaboration of Durham, Northumbria, Newcastle, Sunderland and Teesside universities, secures funding from the Football Foundation, Podium, HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England), Sport England, and Northern Rock Foundation.

Tracey explained: “The SUNEE initiative brings the universities together through sport and works with hard-to-reach communities and individuals to develop skills and mind-sets. For example we work with alcoholics and drug-users, children in care, homeless people and young mums, using sport to educate them and help them overcome their challenges.

However, we were aware that no-one really knew about SUNEE or understood the different work programmes we operate. We knew awareness about the initiative was vital if our longer-term ambitions were to be realised and needed a website that would support these needs.”

“The old website was out-of-date, inconsistent and difficult to navigate; we knew it was high time to revise and update it.”

With this in mind SUNEE commissioned Indigo Multimedia, a new media agency based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, to design and build the new website.

Tracey said: “The team at Indigo was approachable, professional and helpful; they provided well-thought out ideas for the new website and made lots of extra suggestions on exciting ways that the website could work. 

“It was a very easy process; even the training for the website’s content management system was simple. Indigo really took the stress out of delivering a new website and made it an enjoyable experience for me.”

“And when the SUNEE project manager, Regional Universities Sports Co-ordinator (North East) Neil Hurren, saw the site he was very impressed with its design and layout."

The website project began in September 2008 and was ready for launch by December. Andrew Graney, web director at Indigo Multimedia, said: “it was important that the website was easy to use for a website visitor but we also recognised that it needed to be accessible for the SUNEE team who needed to update the website as and when required. With this as a chief priority, we developed a fresh new brand for SUNEE and ensured that the look and feel of the website was modern, clear and crisp.”

The new website includes an area that explains fully the SUNEE project and its areas of work. Tracey said: “As well as aligning the design of the site with the new branding, we can now update the content of the website easily and swiftly to fulfil expectations from funders, partners, the five universities and any other interested parties. University students now write for the news section of the website and we can also add information about events and conferences that we run.”

“We are delighted with the new website; it represents SUNEE well and has allowed us to explain the initiative in a simple and accessible way and has helped us raise awareness and understanding about our work.”

“This is evident; the website has already attracted triple the number of visitors and has already played a significant part in boosting awareness about the initiative.”

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