Having recently merged with the Australian Synchatron, ANSTO was in the perfect position to redevelop their site and upgrade to Drupal 8.
Context
The ANSTO site required a complete overhaul as it didn’t meet current accessibility standards, wasn’t mobile-responsive and was running on an expensive legacy Content Management System.
Serving as one of the key communications tools for external relations, the ANSTO website needed to reflect current web standards as well as meet their key business objective of increasing community engagement. In addition to this, ANSTO merged with the Australian Synchrotron, a particle accelerator research facility located in Melbourne. The merger of the nation’s most significant nuclear science infrastructure meant the redevelopment of the website was a perfect opportunity to consolidate under new ANSTO branding.
About the Client
Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) is the country's premier nuclear science facility. As one of Australia’s largest public research organisations, ANSTO is recognised as an international leader in nuclear science, technology and research.
THE SOLUTION
Prior to partnering with PreviousNext, ANSTO engaged an external design firm to undertake a review and provide design approaches for the consolidation of content from both the ANSTO and Australian Synchrotron websites onto a single platform. The updated designs were developed using data gathered from user research sessions in order to meet the key requirement of increasing community engagement.
To ease the significant task of populating the new ANSTO site with content, PreviousNext developed tooling that migrated news and researcher content from the previous version of the ANSTO and Synchrotron sites to the updated one. Refining the design approach, PreviousNext and ANSTO collaborated to develop a component-based design for the new site, an approach that gave ANSTO increased flexibility in the creation of their new content pages. To further improve upon the current levels of public engagement, a Search Engine Optimisation audit was conducted, whilst configurable News, Events and Social Components now feature on the ANSTO homepage.
THE RESULTS
The new ANSTO website was launched in August 2018 to coincide with National Science Week. The updated site consists of pages created entirely with the newly-developed library of components that were built using Drupal 8. The new library of components made available to ANSTO now allows internal content editors much more freedom and flexibility to build custom pages across the website by selecting the components of their choice.
The website is now hosted, managed and supported on PreviousNext's cloud hosting platform.