We’ve been very quiet on our blog this year, because we’ve had a very busy year. We’ve had the opportunity to work on some great sites, and we’ve got a couple of very exciting projects in the pipeline that we’ll be sharing with you later in the year. Recently, we launched a new, highly functional website for the Centre for Economic Governance and Aids in Africa (CEGAA).

This site was challenging primarily in terms of the information architecture. The client wanted to include a variety of information types. Projects need both a description and a variety of on-site related articles, as well as connected news articles and various downloadable documents. The Knowledge Centre section of the site contains a large number of on-site and downloadable resources about various topics that the organisation is knowledgable in, as well as a space where media specialists can download zip files of important documents on specific topics. The brief was to ensure that the site was accessible for academics, media specialists, government analysts, NGO partners, and average people from the communities the organisation serves. We had to keep everything very clean, well-organised and well-signposted.

Luckily, the client was also willing to have us work on implementing their content, so we were able to use our highly flexible content blocks in creative ways, along with a dedicated manager for Projects, to lay out attractive and user-friendly pages.

This project took about three months to complete, primarily because of the sheer volume of content, which organisation staff needed time to select and organise before we could implement it. However, we, and the client, are very pleased with the outcome. Sometimes it’s worth taking the time to get it right.