The Commonwealth is a voluntary association of 53 countries working towards shared goals in democracy and development. Hydrant worked with the Commonwealth Secretariat to rebuild the Commonwealth site to better showcase their work across the globe.
About the project
The Problem
The site previously represented the Commonwealth Secretariat - the organisation that implements the decisions and plans of Commonwealth leaders. The aim of the project was to refresh the site to focus on the work of the Commonwealth countries and organisations, particularly their projects and events around the world.
The website needed to:
- Strengthen the profile of the Commonwealth
- Reach new audiences - be clear, clean and easy to use
- Provide users with a gateway into the Commonwealth and Partner organisations
- Create opportunities for engagement between:
- Commonwealth Governments
- Businesses
- Civil Society Organisations
- Youth Networks
The new site had to be built in line with the Commonwealth’s new brand guidelines, and needed to be responsive to ensure that content was clear and accessible to users on desktop computers, tablets and mobile devices.
The Solution
Hydrant built the new site using Drupal 7, allowing for the requirements to be met with a modern, and robust content management system.
We worked with the Commonwealth’s revised brand guidelines to deliver an updated website design that is fully responsive and works well on desktop, tablet and mobile devices. The website is focussed on the work of the Commonwealth countries and organisations across the globe, and showcases their work through extensive use of multimedia - both onsite and from other online multimedia sites such as YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook.
The new site delivers information about the project work and events that take place across the globe, with content tagged to countries, regions organisation and strategic aims.
This content model allows the site to provide focussed content to users based on their area of interest. The site also features interactive maps allowing visitors to explore the Commonwealth member countries, and the projects and events taking place.
The Results
- The new site is clear and modern, allowing the Commonwealth to showcase work of their member countries and accredited organisations
- The site is fully responsive and provides easy to use content on desktop, tablet and mobile devices
- The content is well structured allowing the easy presentation of relevant content to users based on geography - or strategic “areas of work”
- The site integrates with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr to allow resources to be integrated onto the site
Why Drupal was chosen
The website needed to:
- Strengthen the profile of the Commonwealth
- Reach new audiences - be clear, clean and easy to use
- Provide users with a gateway into the Commonwealth and Partner organisations
- Create opportunities for engagement between:
- Commonwealth Governments
- Businesses
- Civil Society Organisations
- Youth Networks
The new site had to be built in line with the Commonwealth’s new brand guidelines, and needed to be responsive to ensure that content was clear and accessible to users on desktop computers, tablets and mobile devices.
Technical Specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Workbench moderation
We use workbench moderation to provide a content approval workflow that allows the Commonwealth to push content through a multi-tiered approval process, with notifications at each stage. We also use the Workbench module to provide a landing page for admin users showing their current content, and content waiting their input.
oEmbed
We use the oEmbed module to support easy, flexible embedding of third party content onto the site without editors having to worry about copying complicated embed code, or HTML fragments.
Services
We use the services module to present site data in a variety of formats to feed the interactive timeline, and map on the site and keep them automatically updated with the site content.
