EFTA (European Free Trade Association) is an organization of Iceland, Lichtenstein, Norway and Switzerland founded in 1960 by its then seven member states to promote free trade and business. The organization operates a very large website providing all EEA and Free Trade Agreements between the EFTA States and other countries (~ 40,000 documents). The contents on the old website were difficult to find, insufficiently structured and partly. incomplete or obsolete. For this reason, the website should be relaunched.
About the project
Goal
The old site was technically well implemented. However, employees had difficulty managing the many documents and content. Therefore, the management interface and content structure had to be revised. Furthermore, a content audit had to be carried out to remove outdated content and critically evaluate existing content. For the visitors, the contents had to be made accessible via a facet and full-text search, both via the contents retrieved in the CMS and via stored files (Pdf, Word, etc.). Last but not least, the ad contents should be implemented in a modern and flexible design.
Result
We did a relaunch based on Drupal 7. On the one hand, the focus was on the clearly structured structure of the page and the associated documents, but also on a significantly improved user interface (UX) and a new design. The new website has a consistent, clear look, which was technically implemented by a new theme. Some new content types have been developed to support the restructuring. These content types were embedded in the existing backend and visually adapted to the new styling. The contents were made accessible through a structured search (http://www.efta.int/eea-lex). Here the user can choose between a simple search and an advanced search (http://www.efta.int/eea-lex-advanced). For individual agreements and agreements, the data as well as the change history of the texts are represented both graphically and textually (for example, http://www.efta.int/eea-lex/32009R0748).
Technical challenges
By design, a completely new frontend based on bootstrap was set up. For this it was necessary to do a complete restructuring of the Drupal-Theming-Layer in most of the page sections. The site contains a large database of legal texts (CMS content and files) provided to the user via a high-performance search based on Solr. Significant improvements have been made in both the UI and the backend to make this feature reliable and attractive to the user. The legal texts are imported daily from a third party system into the website. In order to ensure the performance of the site, the contents are delivered via a Varnish cache.
Why Drupal was chosen
The old website of EFTA was already implemented in Drupal 7 and it was decided to carry out the relaunch likewise in Drupal 7 in order to avoid a migration of the complex contents to Drupal 8. The main task in the relaunch was the restructuring of the content in order to make it more accessible and workable for both the user and the employees.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
The site contains a large database of legal texts (CMS content and files) provided to the user via a high-performance search based on Solr.
