A New Accessible & Modern Website for the Vehicle Certification Agency

The Blue Frontier design, development and digital teams set about elevating the Vehicle Certification Agency (VCA) website to bring it in line with other government sites. The old website was cluttered, dated and not mobile responsive.

VCA is an Executive Agency of the Department for Transport and exists to improve vehicle safety and environmental protection by providing robust testing and certification to internationally recognised standards.

With more than 40 years’ experience, the VCA has become one of the largest and most well-respected approval bodies. This position is built on a reputation for technical expertise and quality, which is at the heart of everything they do. With this in mind, a new functional and practical website was vital.

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The VCA approached us in need of a new and responsive website. The desired outcome was a carefully designed and optimised site, built to meet the government accessibility guidelines. 

Due to the age of the previous site, the overall design completely lacked user experience and the website style was heavily outdated and cluttered. There were no responsive aspects, which meant the UX for tablet or mobile users was not at all good. The existing website was built using Classic ASP, a language that has not been supported for over 10 years, which opened the site up to numerous security risks and speed issues.

What We Did 

Our aim was to provide the client with a modern and responsive website design that conformed to WCAG AA accessibility standards and offered a more intuitive user experience. The project also offered the client the opportunity to enhance their brand perception and create homogenous brand messaging.

One of the challenges we faced was that the VCA wanted us to meet accessibility standards (AA) while also pushing the government brand guidelines a little to give them their own identity.

During the process of designing and building a new site, the Blue Frontier Digital team also assisted VCA in the reorganisation of the website structure to provide the optimum user experience and handled the redirects from the old website, ensuring a seamless experience for website visitors. 

The new website was built using a content management system (CMS) to make it easy for the client to add new content and present it in a format that they like. The front end was developed using a combination PHP, HTML, CSS and JavaScript to ensure that the design conformed to AA accessibility standards and was optimised for mobile devices.

As a G Cloud supplier and ISO accredited agency, Blue Frontier fully tested the website to ensure it was functional and accessible, as well as responsive across various devices, screen sizes and browsers.