ARMA Website Forum

Welcome to the ARMA Website Forum! We are a community of volunteers   supporting ARMA activities. We pride ourselves on being a friendly forum you will find and we’d love to have you as a member of our community. Please take a moment and register for a free account. If you need any help, please contact ron@arma.me.uk

A friendly place to share ideas and knowledge, ask questions, find help and encourage others that are involved in supporting the Arthritis and Musciloskletal community. Topics include changes & inprovements, new functunality and social media.

 The brief

ARMA is the umbrella body providing a collective voice for the arthritis and musculoskeletal community in the UK. ARMA’s main channel of communication to members is their website.

As a key component of their service to arthritis and musculoskeletal community in the UK, they wanted to ensure they were providing a valuable and easy-to-use resource. ARMA have completed consultation excercise with its members to gain an understanding what members and non-members wanted from this resource, and then to re-design the site around these needs.

 Design & Development

ARMA had a wealth of information on their existing website, however, as the site had grown organically this information had become increasingly challenging to locate and some elements where  dated. The principles which guided the site structure and labelling of content was to

• ensure content was well organised and easy to locate
• ensure content can be maintained current
• provide members with feedback mechanisms and social media networking tools
• provide self-managed online forums

In order to validate our design decisions, we also tested mock-ups of the site with users at every stage – from initial concept sketches through to the final visual design, ensuring we were developing something which met users’ needs and satisfied ARMA objectives.

Once the new site was built, we tested it again with users to validate the final designs and evaluate the site against the original brief.

 ARMA Social Media Strategy

This strategy identifies the ways in which the use of social media can support the strategic aims of the ARMA organisation including member engagement, leadership and sustainability.

The development of social media channels can extend the internal and external communications of the organisation and provide online platforms for the ARMA  to engage with its members and non-members and for members to engage with each other.

This strategy aims to provide support for networking and information exchange and tools which faciliate ARMA staff and members to effectively promote Standards of Care; use of new channels to raise the profile of musculoskeletal conditions with policy-makers and provide a route for influencing service improvement and promoting grater access to treatments.

This strategy aims to establish ARMA as a leader among social media activity within the arthritis and musculoskeletal community.

 Roles and User Capabilities

Whenever you access the ARMA website, the software considers what you are trying to do: read a post, edit a page or site administration. 

The ARMA site allow you to read posts and pages without logging in. However, any other operation is only permitted if you are an ARMA user and only after you have entered your username and password.

For administrative convenience, ARMA have bundled user capabilities into collections called roles. By default, these roles are:

Subscriber:

 - read published posts and pages

Contributor:

- all Subscriber capabilities

- contribute a post (for review by editor), and edit it before publication

Author:

- all Contributor capabilities

- contribute a post, publish/unpublish/edit it, and moderate its comments

Editor:

- all Author capabilities

- contribute/publish/unpublish/edit any user’s post

- contribute or edit any page

- manage all categories and moderate any comment

- read posts and pages which are marked “private”

Administrator:

- all Editor capabilities

- define users and assign them roles

- configure all site options

 Restricted work Area.

Areas of the ARMA site have additional restrictions set-up for closed user groups engaged in joint contribution and peer review .

Additional enforcement and administration in has been added to the site for restricted area. To access ARMA must first assign you as a ‘Contributor’ and added you into the revelent working group. within the group you will be assiged a role as Reviewer, Editor or Administration for the specific restricted area.