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By Imre Gmelig Meijling on
User experience is all about nature and user friendliness at Natuurmonumenten.nl
In September 2012 the new Natuurmonumenten.nl website went live. The website was completely rebuilt with a clear focus on user friendliness and the ability to experience the website from everywhere using mobile phones and tablets. The result is a website which is fully aligned with the newly developed communications strategy aimed at more involvement with the audience.
Why Drupal was chosen:
Natuurmonumenten has a history of working with Drupal. Previous site was a Drupal 6 with Organic Groups. They love the flexibility of the platform and wanted to continue to use their in-house knowledge of Drupal to push the boundaries of D7 in their new website.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Business Background
The new Natuurmonumenten website aspires to increase public awareness about nature. It encourages visitors to discover natural areas and activities and it motivates going out and explore new outdoor experiences. By involving the audience more into nature, the website also aims to increase public donations and voluntary work as well as taking part in area-specific communities.
Technical Goals
The website content revolves around themes such as natural areas, seasons and various activities that all have found their way into the website’s visual design. Website visitors can upload photos for photo competitions that are featured inside the members magazine. The editors will select a photo every month which will be spotlighted on the website. Other submissions will be archived for future reference or put on the Facebook page.
Business Results
An extensive content analysis which Natuurmonumenten and Presenter executed together concluded that website visitors are primarily interested in trails for biking, walking or rafting. Natural areas and their corresponding activities are popular hotspots within the website, as is the webshop. Natuurmonumenten aims to remove any obstacle on people's path to exploring the outdoors.
The website makes the new content comprehensible and easy to find. Its underlying structure was optimized for these purposes. The use of images as well as the readability of text was drastically improved. Searching for walking trails, guided tours and canoe routes was massively improved. The website was also adapted for use on mobile devices (responsive).
Natuurmonumenten chose Wunderkraut because of our clear story and no-nonsense approach. The interaction and collaborative process that are required for Scrum projects (as used by Wunderkraut) were a perfect match for the flexible set-up of the Natuurmonumenten team. For the visual design Natuurmonumenten contracted PuurPXL, while hosting is managed by KPN.
About Natuurmonumenten
Natuurmonumemten maintains and protects 250.000 acres in 355 natural parks in the Netherlands. Natuurmonumenten is an independent organisation that aims to protect nature, valuable landscapes and cultural history by acquiring and safeguarding natural areas, for current and future generations.
Technical specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
Page Manager, Panels and Panelizer allow the content editors page-specific administration based on one template with the option to make derivatives.
Display Suite, in and of itself, reduces the number of Drupal template files. Apache Solr and FacetAPI are the fast and de facto search modules, based on performance and quality. Fieldable Panel Panes enables content editors to create call-to-actions and stand alone info blocks, without the overhead of nodes or content types. All used modules have ability to do proper versioning. Core Block was not used because of the need for flexibility in placing blocks everywhere.
Community contributions:
Natuurmonumenten.nl was the ultimate test case in the release of Display Suite 2.0.
Project team:
Wunderkraut Belgium (Ghent): Dieter Beheydt, Davy Van Den Bremt, Jan-Yves Vanhaverbeke, Cedric Spillebeen, Kristof De Jaeger, Jochen Stals, Nils Destoop, Ma"hias Vandermaesen, Frank Baele, Sanne Jansen, Joachim Verbeke, Peter De Bouvere,
Sectors:
Non-profit
