Working in the open to redesign one of the longest running websites in the world

During 2020 and 2021, Studio 24 has been working with the iconic W3C on the redesign of their website.

About the client

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded by the inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, and is responsible for key standards that make the World Wide Web work (such as HTML, CSS, accessibility, web payments and more).

W3C and Studio 24: a shared vision

Studio 24 has always believed in building a better web, using standards to make sure the sites we build are accessible to all regardless of who you are, what internet access you have, what device you’re using, or any disability you may have. We even have our own Accessibility Lead Developer in the team to help move this forward. In this regard Studio 24’s beliefs are perfectly aligned with W3C’s mission in making a ‘Web for All’.

In the 20-year history of Studio 24, it feels as if we’ve been leading up to a project like this. Our company mission to bring together human-centered design and open source technology is ideally fitted to a client such as W3C.Simon Jones, Studio 24

Project goals

W3C is redesigning its website and revising the information architecture to:

Show the world who they are and what they offer.
Improve the organisation and usability of the website for key audiences.
Communicate the W3C brand more effectively.
Motivate people to participate in the organisation.

Redesigning our website is crucial to improve the overall experience of those who depend on us for our web standards work. As W3C makes the web work for everyone, Studio 24 will help make our website work better for everyone.Coralie Mercier, Head of W3C Marketing & Communications, W3C

Project challenges

In March 2020 we started the website redesign for W3C. This is a prestigious, exciting, and challenging project. The redesign needs to communicate what W3C does with a modern, inclusive, usable website. Because of the age and size of the site we have some unique challenges to address.

Content strategy: the W3C website is one of the longest running websites in the world. As it has grown organically over time, does the site meet its purpose and is it easily understood by users?
URL strategy: with a massive 2 million documents, the web page addresses are the backbone of the website.
Technical strategy: the W3C was founded in the early days of the web in 1994, which means they will have a variety of different systems and ways of managing web pages.
Working with stakeholders: some stages of the project require a lot of time to gather appropriate feedback.

And, of course, 2020 had all the disruption caused by the Coronavirus pandemic. Not ideal when you are trying to work on your dream project!

Keep up to date with the project progress

One of the key elements of this project is that we work in the open so all the decisions we’ve made can be understood by the W3C community. At the start of the project, we set up a website to share our progress, key documents, and learnings.

We will continue to document progress on the working in the open site until the launch later this year.

Key decisions from the timeline that you may like to read about include:

Please browse the timeline to see the full scope of the work.

We will announce the launch later this year. Be the first to hear about it! Follow us on Twitter, follow us on Linked In, or sign up to the Studio 24 newsletter.

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Studio 24 Ltd

What we can do for you

Strategy

We help clients understand what’s possible in digital and the best way to achieve their goals. Strategy and planning is the most important part of any project. We use our expertise to guide and advise you, transforming your digital strategy into success.

– Discovery
– Project scoping
– Stakeholder workshops
– User research
– User story mapping
– User personas
– Competitor research
– Technical architecture
– Digital best practises / Web Standards
– Inclusive design / Accessibility
– Technology trends (e.g. Internet of Things, AI, bots)

Content strategy

Content is such an important part of the web, a lot of our work is the planning, creation, and delivery of content. We help you understand what content you need on your site, what communicates to your users, and what content will help you achieve your goals.

– Site audits (what’s on your site now)
– Information Architecture (what should be on your site)
– Content modelling (how we model your content in a CMS)
– Content creation planning
– Adaptive content (flexible content that can support multiple channels such as web and mobile)
– Multilingual content
– Content migration
– Accessibility audit

Design

Taking a user-centered approach to design focuses us on what really matters: your users. We design for mobile first, which means we focus on communicating your message on small screens first, then scaling up for larger screens. This helps focus on the really important content, and gives great results across any device; mobile, desktop, and in-between.

– User Experience design (UX)
– Responsive design
– Style guides / digital brand strategy
– User Interface design (UI)
– Illustration
– Interactive design and animation
– Email design
– Wireframing and prototyping
– Social Media branding

Technology

Digital technology has always been in our blood. We’ve built a wide array of digital products for our clients, including membership systems, auction sites, complex booking forms, and custom CMSs.

We’re big believers in open source, we specialise in WordPress CMS, develop custom web applications on Laravel and Symfony, and use high performance tools such as Varnish and Apache Solr.

– Content Management Systems (CMS)
– Web applications
– Database design
– PHP development
– Interactive maps (Leaflet.js, Google Maps, ESRI Maps, Ordnance Survey)
– Content migration from external systems
– API / Web Services integration
– Creating REST APIs
– Back Office integration
– Code audits
– Security
– Performance
– Improving and maintaining legacy PHP applications

Digital Marketing

Analysing, optimising and improving your digital marketing and SEO. Our Data & Content Strategist manages PPC spend to ensure your ad spend is working for you, and advises and guides on a wide range of digital marketing, SEO and content marketing topics. Our goal is to get you results.

– Digital marketing / SEO strategy
– Website analytics
– PPC management (AdWords, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads)
– Social Media management
– Social Media audit
– Identifying key metrics (KPIs)
– Data analysis
– Technical Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
– SEO audit
– SEO keyword analysis
– International SEO

Support

We have a dedicated team to help manage support for our clients, which is backed up by the studio development team. For those clients with critical support requirements we offer 24/7 out of hours support to respond to any critical issues with your site.

Hosting & Domains

You need a place for your website or application to live on the internet so it can be accessed by your users. We’ve managed hosting for our clients for over 18 years, from simple affordable cloud servers to multi-server, high availability hosting spread across multiple data centers. We’ve been a Rackspace partner for over a decade, we offer cloud and dedicated hosting backed up by Rackspace’s expert engineers. We host on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace Cloud. We also manage domains and SSLs on behalf of our customers, taking the complexity out of digital.

What don’t we do?

We specialise in digital, so we don’t offer print or branding design. We can, however, interpret and develop your brand on digital. Our focus is on the open source UNIX technology stack, PHP is our specialist programming language along with HTML/CSS/JavaScript. When required we work with trusted partners to provide specialised services (e.g. enterprise search, photography, video).

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