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Case Study
Traffic
Traffic is a leading non-governmental organisation working globally on trade in wild animals and plants in the context of both biodiversity conservation and sustainable development.
The Brief
The TRAFFIC website had been run on Squarespace for a number of years and was managed largely by the organisation's Global Communications Coordinator. The site was becoming unwieldy and hard to keep updated with the variety of content required, so a more structured framework was needed.
Having considered Processwire as a possible solution, and noticing that RO Web Solutions had built complex sites using the framework, TRAFFIC got in touch and this led to a long and successful collaboration on a number of projects.
What was needed was an easy to use system that would allow for all kinds of structured website content including news, reports, publications and a wide range of other informational pages.
Key to the success of the new website would be an improvement in the findability of TRAFFIC's publications and reports, which have been published regularly for many years.
Being a global organisation with a strong presence in Asia, an additional requirement was the ability to publish selected content in multiple languages where available. These include Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, German, Spanish and French.
Our Solution
We devised the content management around a series of building blocks of content types and layout. This allows the TRAFFIC admin team to create almost any kind of page content simply by adding block types to the page and inserting the necessary content (text/images), giving a great deal of flexibility in page creation and manipulation.
We worked closely with TRAFFIC, whose bold designs, combined with a large library of high-quality imagery, helped to make the new site stand out in terms of appearance. RO Web Solutions role was to take TRAFFIC's creatives, build HTML templates from these and wire them up into the content management system.
Making the content easily searchable was one of the main project requirements. The old site had become complex and unstructured and it was difficult to navigate around the site and find what was wanted. Now there are multiple different ways to find content - by category, region, date published (for news and reports) or a site-wide search.
Any field can be made to be multi-language, and can be provided with alternate content for any language installed on the site. This provided the necessary flexibility for TRAFFIC where, for example, some pages were available in say, Chinese, whereas others were available in French. Where a field doesn't have alternate content for a chosen language, the default (English) is used as a fallback.
Large parts of the site have now been translated into Chinese and Vietnamese; switching between viewing in these languages is a simple matter, and page editing is all carried out from one edit screen.
The Outcome
The team at TRAFFIC have been very impressed with the ease of managing content, flexibility, and overall functionality of the site. Additionally, TRAFFIC can rely on RO Web Solutions' rapid support service but, with our rock-solid hosting, very little support has been required other than a few functional changes requested by the team at TRAFFIC.
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