Roscommon County Childcare Committee: Building a Public Sector Digital Hub for Early Years in Roscommon

THE CHALLENGE: ONE PLATFORM, THREE AUDIENCES, SIGNIFICANT COMPLEXITY

RCCC sits at the intersection of government regulation, community support and public information. The volume and variety of content the site needed to carry was substantial: national resources from Tusla, Siolta, Gov.ie, Hub na Nóg and First 5, local funding information, training calendars, job board listings, the ECCE eligibility calculator, childminding guidance aligned with the National Action Plan for Childminding 2021 to 2028, and a comprehensive Guide to Choosing Childcare for parents making one of the most significant decisions in their family's life.

That breadth of content creates a real design problem. Presented without structure, it overwhelms every audience. Presented with the wrong hierarchy, critical information gets buried. The brief required a site that was simultaneously comprehensive and navigable, authoritative and accessible.

The project ran as a long-term, iterative collaboration between RCCC's Sylvia Murphy and the Designwest team. Rather than a fixed specification handed over at the start, the brief functioned as a living document. Every stage of development was reviewed, tested and refined against the organisation's operational reality. The result is a site that reflects how RCCC actually works, not how a web agency assumed it might.

NAVIGATION ARCHITECTURE: SERVING MULTIPLE USER JOURNEYS

The navigation structure was the first and most consequential design decision on this project. With content spanning parents, providers, childminders, resources, quality frameworks, a jobs board and organisational information, a flat or generic nav would have failed immediately.

The final navigation structure organises the site into seven primary areas: Home, Parents, Providers, Childminding, Resources, Quality, Jobs Board and About Us. Each top-level section carries dropdown content relevant to its specific audience. A parent looking for childcare options follows an entirely different path through the site to a childminder checking regulatory compliance requirements or a provider accessing training information.

Three priority CTAs sit directly on the homepage hero: News and Events, Useful Quick Links and the ECCE Eligibility Calculator. These were chosen because they represent the three most common immediate needs of a first-time visitor to an RCCC site. The calculator in particular is a high-value functional tool that gives parents direct access to Early Childhood Care and Education eligibility information without needing to search through multiple pages.

HOMEPAGE DESIGN: WARM, TRUSTWORTHY AND IMMEDIATELY FUNCTIONAL

The homepage brief for a public sector childcare organisation is specific. The audience is primarily parents, many of whom are approaching the site at a moment of genuine stress or uncertainty. The design needed to communicate trust, warmth and competence from the first moment of arrival.

The hero section leads with a full-width family photograph and the headline Supporting Families and the Early Years in Roscommon in a warm, confident typographic treatment. The RCCC brand colours, blue, yellow and green, were applied throughout to maintain visual consistency with existing RCCC materials and to signal institutional credibility to returning users and partner organisations.

Below the hero, a Guide to Choosing Childcare feature section provides an immediate navigational pathway for parents at the beginning of their search. This section addresses the reality that many parents arrive on a childcare committee website with no prior knowledge of the sector and need clear, empathetic signposting before they can engage with more detailed content.

The About Us section carries the organisation's mission statement prominently: Our purpose is to develop, support and enhance a wide range of high-quality and inclusive early childhood care and education services that are responsive to the rights and needs of children, while providing support to parents, guardians and families. Positioning this early in the page architecture grounds everything that follows in a clear organisational purpose.

RESOURCE MANAGEMENT: PRECISION AT SCALE

One of the most technically demanding aspects of this project was the migration and categorisation of a complex array of national and local resources. RCCC needed to signpost parents and providers to authoritative external sources including Tusla, Siolta, Gov.ie, Hub na Nóg and First 5, while also maintaining local documentation, templates, safeguarding protocols and regulatory guidance on the site itself.

Precision in link management was a primary project pillar. A broken link to a Tusla form or an outdated ECCE circular is not just an inconvenience on this site. It is a failure point in a system that families and providers depend on. Every resource link was verified, categorised and structured within the navigation in a way that allows users to locate what they need without requiring knowledge of which government department or body owns it.

The National Action Plan for Childminding 2021 to 2028 was given dedicated prominence within the Childminding section. This eight-year national framework is a significant policy development for the childminding sector in Ireland, and RCCC needed its digital presence to reflect that significance clearly. The section was designed to carry both the plan itself and the practical local guidance that supports its implementation in County Roscommon.

EMPOWERING THE RCCC TEAM: CMS TRAINING AND CONTENT INDEPENDENCE

The most significant long-term success measure for this project was not the design. It was whether the RCCC team could manage the site themselves after handover.

Designwest implemented Elementor as the page builder, specifically because it provides a visual, drag-and-drop editing environment that non-technical staff can use confidently without coding knowledge. The Jobs Board, Events calendar and Weekly Bulletins were all configured as independently manageable content types. Staff needed to be able to post a new childcare vacancy, add an upcoming training event or publish the weekly bulletin without raising a support ticket.

To support this, Designwest produced a suite of custom video tutorials covering the specific tasks the RCCC team needed to perform most regularly. These were not generic WordPress tutorials. They were recorded against the actual RCCC site, walking through the exact steps for each task in the context of the live system the team would be using every day. This approach reflects a principle Designwest applies to all public sector and community organisation web projects: the goal is a team that feels confident and in control of their own platform, not a team that needs to ring a developer every time they want to change a date.

TECHNICAL INFRASTRUCTURE: FROM STAGING TO SECURE LIVE ENVIRONMENT

The project involved a structured transition from staging to live production, managed through Plesk and Hostinger. Browser security warnings encountered during the staging phase were identified, diagnosed and resolved before launch, ensuring no trust signals were broken at the moment of go-live.

The site was built with full responsive design across desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile. For an organisation serving a county-wide audience across Roscommon, many of whom will access the site on mobile devices in homes, creches or childminding settings, mobile performance is not optional. The navigation, hero, resource sections and childcare guide all perform cleanly across device sizes without content loss or layout degradation.

Accessibility was addressed throughout the build. The site carries an accessibility icon in the bottom right corner of each page, reflecting RCCC's public sector obligations and its commitment to ensuring all families and providers in Roscommon can access the information they need regardless of accessibility requirements.

THE RESULT

Roscommon County Childcare Committee now has a digital platform that reflects the scope and seriousness of its work. It serves parents, providers and childminders with the information they need, organised in a way that respects the complexity of their situations without adding to it. The RCCC team manages the platform independently, with confidence. The site is live at roscommonchildcare.ie.

This was not a simple website project. It was the construction of digital infrastructure for a public sector organisation that supports some of the most important decisions families in County Roscommon make. We are proud of what the Designwest team and the RCCC team built together.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Navigation architecture was built around three distinct audiences, parents, providers and childminders, with separate pathways for each user type through a complex content ecosystem.
• The ECCE Eligibility Calculator, News and Events, and Useful Quick Links were placed as primary homepage CTAs, reflecting the most common immediate needs of first-time site visitors.
• Resource management was treated as a precision discipline, with every link to national and local childcare guidance verified, categorised and structured for reliability.
• Elementor CMS implementation and bespoke video tutorials gave the RCCC team full independence to manage the Jobs Board, Events calendar and Weekly Bulletins without developer support.
• The iterative, feedback-led development process produced a site built around how RCCC actually operates, not around a fixed specification written before the work began.

Declan Foley is an Irish Creative Director with over 30 years of experience in graphic design, branding, print, and digital media. As Creative Director of Designwest Creatives Ltd, he leads design projects for Irish businesses, government departments, and organisations nationwide, from brand identity and publication design to large-scale print campaigns. Explore the portfolio at designwest.ie.