The challenge of doing sexual health outreach work in East London has been transformed by police action in the run up to the Olympics. This was the unusual starting point for the Open Doors Sexual Health Clinic's request for a new website.
The Open Doors team of nurses has for years relied on its knowledge of East London brothels to provide critical sexual health advice, checkups and free condoms. Now that the police were closing them down in the run up to the 2012 Olympics, the nurses needed to find an alternative route to continuing to provide healthcare to sexworkers.
So our task was to build a website that could speak clearly to east London sexworkers with the sorts of advice that the nurses used to provide on visits. At the same time it also needed to fill the gap of getting women to come in for check-ups.
On the advice and information front, we used our well-versed processes to tease out a clear structure for all leaflet content produced by Open Doors. We comissioned illustrator Jackie Parsons to create custom artwork for the site. And on the check-ups front we integrated a simple online form into the fabric of every webpage, encouraging users to get in touch.
With the inclusion of a new Twitter feed on the side, the nurses now also have an additional way of updating the site and reaching followers via their mobiles. Finally Open Doors gold-plated the site by commissioning translations of all the content on all the pages into Portuguese, Romanian, Polish and Chinese.
