Tasting success with Sodexho

Background
Excluding commercial restaurants, Sodexho is the world's leading food service provider with global operations spanning over 70 countries. With 324,000 employees worldwide and a total net income for 2004-2005 of 159 million Euro, they are heavily committed to educational, healthcare, business and defence sectors around the world.

Studio North were approached to take on the design of the individual Sodexho countries’ websites bearing in mind that the client would essentially be constructing and populating the websites themselves using their own content management software. It was also imperative that individual countries had the maximum flexibility over homepage layout, colour schemes and page structure whilst at the same time the site had to be highly accessible for disabled web users.

Solution
Studio North proposed a modular design using structured markup language which could be easily integrated into Sodexho’s Tridion content management system. The design was kept deliberately clean and simple whilst a modular approach allowed each individual company to choose the elements that they required on their particular homepage and also select a colour scheme to be applied throughout the website from within the CMS. Similarly, employing structured HTML, and therefore separating style from content, allowed for maximum accessibility for screen readers and voice-style browsers.

The Studio North design team worked closely with the software developers (Tridion) in the Netherlands, the Sodexho accessibility consultants (Ipedis) in France and the Sodexho management and development teams in France, Belgium and the United States in order to deliver working HTML and CSS templates catering for every design eventuality. Furthermore, Studio North contributed significantly to the design and production of the Sodexho in-house brand eGuidelines documentation detailing how future websites should be built in order to fit within the overall Sodexho brand.

The initial pilot websites for France, Belgium (which was multilingual - French and Dutch) and the United Kingdom were rolled out to company-wide acclaim in October 2006, with the remainder of the websites to be implemented during the early part of 2007.

Visit the websites:
http://www.sodexho.co.uk
http://www.sodexho.fr
http://www.sodexho.be

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