Environmental Standards Scotland (ESS)

ESS have been a client of the Gate for a number of years now, the need for this public body to have a website first came about due to the UKs exit from the European Union and as a result a new website was required to allow ESS to take up the mantle and fill in the environmental enforcement gap that was subsequently left.

I was responsible for taking the approved site designs from Sketch/Invision and building a completely bespoke/custom WordPress theme. The site is largely built using the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin, this allowed me to create various pre defined content blocks that the sites editors and authors could then pick up, populate and move around on the page with ease, making it very easy and quick to get content onto the site and out there for public consumption.

The site also contains a lot of PDF and Word documents, since these documents can't be made completely accessible, the Gate created a very specific template that allows the sites editors to easily take content from PDFs and other Documents and create accessible and compliant HTML documents, these documents are cut down and tailored towards digital/online consumption.

The Gate where also asked to use the newly created Scottish Government Design System to create the site, the Design System comprises various components, site styles, page layouts and so these components where taken and re created as custom WordPress content blocks via ACF utlising the existing Design System markup and manipulating it to the sites needs. Although the client wanted to use the Design System, they where very specific in satting that they wanted the site to look different and so the underlying functinality and markup was used but componetns where styled very differently in order to make the site stand out the public sector arena.