The key focus of the new ISEAL website – aside from the usual hygiene factors such as mobile responsiveness – was to drive more active engagement with visitors to the site.

ISEAL is the global membership organisation for credible sustainability standards. Their members are standards systems from across multiple sectors, such as Fairtrade International, the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Rainforest Alliance. They work closely with governments, businesses and NGOs to drive improvements and transform places and industries.

IE Digital has worked with ISEAL over the past few years, supporting and maintaining their old Drupal 6 website and delivering various digital projects. When the time came for a new website, ISEAL called on us to deliver a total overhaul.

User Journey Mapping

ISEAL’s key priority was to increase engagement with its visitors, to better articulate what ISEAL has to offer and how it relates to them.

The member community of c.160 standards systems were generally engaged and understood what ISEAL had to offer, so we agreed to park the member community site and revamp it in a future phase. Other visitors, particularly those who weren’t familiar with the standards sector, were struggling to engage with ISEAL or decide what to do next. We realised that other audiences – businesses, representatives from Government, researchers, and potential new members – all needed much clearer signposting to help them navigate the content on offer.

We began by mapping the user journeys to ensure that the new site would meet the needs of these different visitor types. Our copywriters created a new segmentation and brand messaging matrix, to define the tone of voice and key messages for each audience, with sample copy for a range of scenarios.

Unmissable calls to action

IE Digital then wireframed and storyboarded the new site’s design.

A prominent button on every page invites visitors to “Get Involved”, putting involvement and engagement front and centre at all times. This opens an action-based quicklinks menu that shows what’s on offer and the ways to engage: from to attending an event or becoming a member, to subscribing to the newsletter or accessing over 500 multimedia resources.

This was a step-change improvement from the previous structure, which had various actions scattered across the site.

Making quality content the star of the show

ISEAL’s many resources had been buried layers deep in the old site navigation. These are now much easier for users to access, with a filter-driven faceted search that helps users to explore the documents, videos and audio files they need.

We also shone a spotlight on ISEAL’s impressive case studies, by giving them a much greater presence on the site.

This is all complemented by a much less cluttered design that gives content more room to breathe, and a slicker User Interface (UI).

Flexible Drupal 8 CMS

Last but not least, we had to ensure a positive user experience for ISEAL’s internal users – including marketing staff, conference planners and membership managers – all of whom will be creating and curating varied content for the site. They were already familiar with Drupal 6 as the content management system (CMS) to the old website, so the move to Drupal 8 made sense.

In order to give ISEAL real flexibility in how it structures and organises its web pages, we created an extensive toolset within the Drupal CMS.

IE Digital launched the new ISEAL website in early January 2018, just 14 weeks since project kick-off.

We’ll manage the ongoing support and maintenance for the site, which is hosted in our Acquia Cloud environment. And a little further down the line, we can’t wait to get our teeth into the member community site, the next phase of ISEAL’s digital evolution.

Meanwhile, it’s still a little early to measure the results, but feedback has been very positive and ISEAL are delighted with the new site.

See the new ISEAL website for yourself.