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Area Alert is a Drupal distribution (maintained by Mediacurrent) that is available to all. Visit the official Drupal project page for more information. 

During times of uncertainty, like the COVID-19 pandemic, communicating timely information is vital. That’s what drove the Mediacurrent team to create Area Alert. 

Area Alert is an open source, pre-built Drupal solution for emergency response sites comes with 4 content types and 15+ components including carousels, FAQs, maps, and media content.

Key features include:

  • Enterprise-level security
  • Fully responsive, mobile-ready theme
  • Fast translation using https://gtranslate.io/
  • Full-text site search to quickly search for a specific topic
  • Out of the box, pre-configured content types such as landing pages and press releases
  • Automated content aggregation for article content with a dedicated landing page and featured news area on the homepage
  • Twitter integration

About the project

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The Challenge

Our vision for Area Alert was to support organizations to quickly build highly performant, low-cost, and easy-to-update emergency websites during the COVID-19 pandemic and other large-scale emergencies. 

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Our Approach

Confront Crisis with a User-Centric Design

The Mediacurrent team took a user-centric approach, mapping the journeys of those faced with perhaps some of the most difficult days of their lives, to build a Drupal emergency site for organizations that are on the front lines. Read more about our  UI design approach for Area Alert on the Mediacurrent blog. 

Area Alert Color Picker Site administrators can quickly add branded colors to reassure users that the site is a trustworthy source of information.



Prime for Emergency Response

We prioritized user scenarios for various difficult situations, imagining them both on mobile devices as well as desktop. A pre-planned main menu with a recommended main navigation, built-in site search, and integration with news and Twitter are key features to deliver accurate and timely information.
 

3 quick-info cards for critical information, such as a stay at home order A row of quick-info cards can be used to summarize information and lead users to a landing page.



Empower Authors

We wanted to empower authors to spend more time communicating and less time figuring out how to use their website. Area Alert is built on top of Mediacurrent’s Rain install profile and comes with improved authoring out-of-the-box. 

Sample content comes pre-loaded to help editors quickly get started.



Results

Speedy Time to Launch

Area Alert expedites emergency website creation, configuration, and deployment. Organizations can now rapidly develop and deploy emergency websites in a matter of hours or days, not weeks or months. 

Calm in the Chaos

Our overall design approach takes the panicked user into consideration. We strove to maximize findability by employing high color contrast, clear type hierarchy, plain language, and classic interface colors (such as blue for links, red for alerts, yellow for warnings, etc.) Large, clear pointer/touch targets welcome shaking fingers. 

Support for First Responders

Area Alert reduces calls to emergency services by providing re-usable information centrally to communities in need. The flexible system accommodates not only a wide range of emergency scenarios but the many potential competencies and quantities of personnel that would be resourced to make vital information available to the public.

Awards and Recognition

  • Acquia Engage Finalist: Open Source Giants 
  • DotCOMM Award Gold for ‘Website-Informational’
  • W³  Website Awards Silver for ‘General Website - News’
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Why Drupal was chosen

  • Open source: We are proud to give back not just to the Drupal open source project, but to the network of local communities worldwide that may be able to make a difference with this site. 
  • Speed and Performance: Users in crisis may not have fast internet, or they may be on mobile data. In an emergency, networks can become overloaded and slow. We knew Drupal could perform under pressure. 
  •  Mobile-first: Drupal supports responsive design to deliver critical information on any device. 

Technical Specifications

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

This distribution combines the Rain distribution with a custom starter theme and pre-loaded sample content.  Paragraphs were used for easy page-building.