British Sugar: BBRO Portal

Overview

Background: British Sugar is the UK's sole producer of sugar from beet, supplying to 50 per cent of the UK sugar market. The company produces 1 million tonnes of sugar a year and processes 8 million tonnes of sugar beet grown by 4,000 farmers.

Industry: Sole UK producer of sugar from beet in the UK

Need: To streamline processes and drive down costs when handling legal and financial paperwork from its 4,000 growers

Benefits: Web design from FDC

Need:

To increase the awareness, and ultimately site traffic to the British Beet Research Organisation's (BBRO) portal.

Solution:

To merge the BBRO portal with the already-popular British Sugar On-line portal. Because British Sugar on-line was receiving ten times the number of unique visitors to the BBRO, it was felt that merging the two would have greater impact and would encourage user crossover.

BS Online exists to provide British Sugar information to farmers to help them run their businesses more efficiently. BBRO contains more technical, agricultural information on topics like diseases, weather reports and farming methods.

Paul Bee is agricultural communications manager at British Sugar. The merging of these two portals was Paul's project. From a design point of view, it faced many potential pitfalls, not just because of the sheer scale of the project, but in terms of finding a design that suited both divisions and their users.

"This site is for our own staff too, not just sugar growers. There are a large number of admin features on there for British sugar staff, including tools to send emails, faxes and texts, all of which also had to be redesigned too.