The Brief
South East Asia Research News started out as a simple listing page for new research emerging from universities in SE Asia. The team wanted to bring in new design and functionality to improve their outreach and deepen client relationships.
The requirements included:
- Import and reformat all previous content and users
- Develop workflows for new user authentication and permissions
- Enable client universities to publish on the site
- Complete re-design to match with a hardcopy magazine
- Mailchimp integration for sign ups, and newsletter design
- Enable new service offers as they were developed
- Profiles for universities and researchers
- Embargo system to enable journalists notifications to view press releases ahead of publication
What we did
The import process needed careful attention to the need to maintain good SEO, so we developed a path system to keep older references alive while making good semantic choices for new material.
Drupal was chosen as the ideal platform as it enabled very effective workflow and user management systems: users could be given publishing permissions on the basis of proven work, and association with established universities and research institutes. It also enabled integration with other systems such as Mailchimp.
There are a large number of content types on the site: different profiles, research papers, advertising, ARN offers, magazine and newsletter integrations, biographies, jobs listings and a complex set of cross-linking categorisation tools. All these involve different levels of authoring permissions, so we built a customised administration system to make the process as streamlined as possible for the team.
The result
The delivered website took a highly complex array of content and created a coherent structure offering different approaches to navigation and discovery without appearing complicated. The new website enabled the ARN team to progress the site's commercial potential, to enhance its reach and develop their offers to an increasingly wide sector.
Asia Research News fulfils the need for a research hub which brings together many disciplines while at the same time opening science to a lay audience in accessible and exciting ways. The mission was to position Asia Research News at the forefront of science communication experts for the region. We feel our engagement in the project has made a major contribution to that aim.
Technology
- Drupal
- PHP
- Javascript
- Mailchimp
- Issuu
- Cloudflare
