Drupal Website Redesign and Ongoing Support Guttmacher Institute
The Guttmacher Institute is a leading global advocacy organization for sexual and reproductive health and rights who believes good policy starts with credible research and seeks to make that research widely available to those who need it the most.
We originally partnered with the communications team at Guttmacher Institute in 2016 to realign its digital communications strategy, design a beautiful user experience, and develop a powerful digital platform for publishing rich content and data. Its savvy, diverse audience – journalists, policymakers, researchers and human rights advocates – used guttmacher.org to access in-depth reports, peer-reviewed journals and datasets. Guttmacher Institute needed a new platform to deliver its content, provide flexibility, and facilitate innovation, so we chose to move their site from a proprietary CMS to Drupal.
Updated navigation structure
It was clear from day one that redesigning guttmacher.org would be all about its content, but their existing navigation was no longer serving their needs or the needs of their users.
Together, we identified high-value pages and user interactions, simplified navigation and rethought its complex collection of categories. We crafted a content strategy that:
- Brings the organization’s most important topics into sharp focus
- Prioritizes geography as a way to find content
- Facilitates content discovery
- Fosters meaningful user interaction with Guttmacher’s datasets
Data visualizations and infographics
The strong focus on words and data for Guttmacher’s content – with very little photography – was an interesting challenge when originally redesigning guttmacher.org. We helped create a sustainable design system that leverages data visualizations and infographics to deliver content beautifully to users on all devices. We crafted an interface that allows users to select the format most relevant to their specific uses – from simple tables to interactive trend lines and maps.
Leverage Drupal Modules for Content Migration and Data Management
Import Drupal Nodes
Effectively migrating more than a decade’s worth of content and data to the new CMS was a central challenge during the guttmacher.org redesign project. First, we worked with Guttmacher’s communications team to identify high-priority content and establish a migration plan. Later, the institute’s IT team provided XML exports for thousands of discrete pages, which we first ingested into a normalized database structure, then pushed into Drupal via scripted migrations using the Migrate module.
Additionally, we developed standardized spreadsheets for importing content using the Drupal Feeds module, allowing Guttmacher staff to directly manage a number of specific migrations leading up to – and even continuing after – launch.
Not Everything is a Node
We helped the organization standardize a powerful, open source technology stack to publish their data. For content that didn’t fit naturally into Drupal’s node architecture – content that either didn’t require direct editing or needed tighter control of database design to facilitate more efficient queries and processing – we chose alternative storage formats.
- We used CouchDB for static policy content, content that was mostly related to state bills and court cases.
- We implemented a custom SQL-backed schema for Guttmacher’s raw tabular data and exposed that data using a bespoke API written with Silex, then implemented a responsive and highly dynamic single page application with React to act as a frontend for this API.
- We also built simple automation tools using Node to allow the Guttmacher team to easily push new datasets into the system on an ongoing basis.
This diverse ecosystem of applications and technologies are deployed using Docker, letting us simplify our server environment and better mirror production on our staging environment or even locally.
Rebrand & refresh
Our relationship continued after launch to support and iteratively improve guttmacher.org. About ten years after the original redesign, the Guttmacher Institute communications team came to Aten with a new logo and sought our creative direction for a refreshed color & typography palette, all with an upcoming website refresh in mind. Based on the established creative direction we created a refreshed, cohesive and accessible website design system. Our Front-end Drupal Developers built it out alongside their internal team and we launched the refreshed site in record time - just two months after we started design exploration.
Our design and build with Aten in 2016 proved to be a great foundation, an excellent fit for Guttmacher’s complex, constantly evolving content. We continue to leverage the entirety of Aten’s expertise for special projects and general support, from Drupal technical knowledge through design, strategy, accessibility, data handling—and sharp project management to bring it all together.
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