The Big Tidy Up


Technology:

.NET, C#, JavaScript, jQuery, Bootstrap, Google Maps

Category:

Online Portals / .NET Portfolio / Charity & non-profits

Our client

Keep Britain Tidy is the leading environmental charity in the UK. Their goal is to reduce litter, improve local places and prevent waste. The Big Tidy Up is England’s biggest-ever litter pick, enabling people to come together to transform their public spaces. Since 2008, The Big Tidy Up has mobilised more than half a million people in more than 25,000 groups to collect nearly 120,000 bags of rubbish and has inspired people to make real and lasting changes in their neighbourhoods and to come together to work on other initiatives to improve their local environment.

Client’s need

Our client needed a microsite to promote their litter pick events and enable users to create accounts, organize themselves in groups, create and promote events and find initiatives in the area where they live. To meet these requirements, we built a web portal that incorporates several CMS functionalities.

Our Solution

We had a dedicated development team of two C# .NET experts working on this project. We built a custom solution based on our internally-developed CMS, Associus, and used JavaScript technologies with custom jQuery plugins. We used a plugin to improve the scroll design, a Carousel plug-in to improve content navigation, Bootstrap slider, form and grid, and LESS to extend CSS with dynamic behaviour. For image previews, we used a jQuery library, Image LightBox Responsive. We used several Google Maps features (APIs for drag & drop, coordinates identification, postcode identification by street and city, measuring distances between points on the map) to enable the site’s users to easily find events in their area: a map displays the location of upcoming cleaning events and a search box enables the users to get specific results for a particular town or postcode. The biggest project challenge was optimizing the loading speed for the events on the map, but we managed to overcome this with an advanced .NET caching solution with SQL Server.

Client’s benefits from working with us

  • A small team with a wide range of technical expertise areas
  • A deep understanding of their particular needs, having worked with them on many previous projects
  • A highly customized solution delivered in a very short time