I've been working with the unionlearn website team for the last few months on a major redesign. The new website has now gone live, ready for 2015.

Unionlearn wanted to improve their previous online offering, while also making it more accessible for the increasing amount of visitors using smartphones, tablets and widescreens. As a result, we've implemented a 'responsive' design that automatically adjusts to the screen size of the device being used.

If a visitor is viewing the website on a widescreen, then the template expands to take up more of the screen. Similarly, when using a smartphone or tablet, the site narrows to fit the screen, removing the need to zoom in and out, or scroll horizontally.

The menu system also changes on smaller screens, providing a touchscreen dropdown menu to make navigation easier.

We also wanted a blog added to the site, and the new blog facility allows written, audio and video blogs to be added.

We've introduced a new comments facility, enabling visitors to share their thoughts on blogs posts and other pages. We're using the leading DISQUS system, which prevents spam, while allowing people to comment using their social media accounts.

The site is built in Drupal, an open source content management system (CMS) used by many other union sites such as the TUC, NUT and UCATT. Drupal is one of the most popular CMS systems. It's free to use. It's popular with unions as its powerful enough for demanding websites.

To improve the speed of the site, we've modified the website architecture and moved the website to Cloud hosting. We are also using a system called 'CloudFlare' that improves both the speeds and security of the website.

Finally, we've made the site entirely encrypted. This provides the protection users will expect when logging in and registering.

We've taken the extra step of encrypting everything, following a Google announcement earlier this year that it will give preference to sites using this approach.

We hope you enjoy the new site. If you have any suggests for improvements or innovations you would like to see, please let us know.