Sector(s)

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Organizations Involved

The Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) is a global, multi-stakeholder membership and partnership organization under the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), that works with poor people, organizations, governments and local entrepreneurs to improve sanitation and hygiene at scale.

Founded in 1990, WSSCC’s work contributes to the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 6, target 2, with far-reaching impacts on related SDG targets. WSSCC also supports national sanitation and advocates on behalf of the 2 billion people without access to improved sanitation across the globe.

WSSCC have developed a new communications and digital strategy in a bid to align with the best practices expected of a leading digital experience in an increasingly digital world.

The WSSCC contracted Vardot to design, develop, launch, host, and maintain their new Drupal 8 platform which will play a central role in this strategy.

The new website was launched in July 2020.

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About the project

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Project Highlights

  • Full mobile-first redesign and website branding extension
  • Newsletter integration through MailChimp
  • Integration with Sharepoint CRM
  • Interactive Google Maps integration (Maps JS API)
  • Automated migration of content from WordPress legacy CMS of over 10,000 node pages, tags, and media files.
  • Ongoing LTA (Long Term Agreement) to support, enhance and retainer the web
  • Hosted on ISO27001 certified high-availability hosting provided from Platform.sh
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Technology Used

  • Infrastructure - Linux, Apache, PHP, and MySQL
  • Performance Layers - Memcache, Varnish, and Cloudflare
  • Application - Drupal, Varbase Distribution, Bootstrap Framework
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WordPress Website Maintenance, Hosting, and Support

While Vardot worked on building the new WSSCC Drupal 8 platform, we provided the WSSCC with reliable hosting on Platform.sh for their legacy WordPress CMS and a dedicated team to provide essential ongoing support and needed upgrades to ensure that the WSSCC doesn’t suffer any unnecessary disruption throughout the project delivery process.

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Information Architecture and Design

Vardot's focus was to first redesign the WSSCC website to make it more visually appealing, clearer, and more consistent with the organizational identity. 

The design was implemented after a discovery workshop held with UNOPS/WSSCC staff. The workshop included persona development, draft wireframing, and structuring of the website.

Vardot’s objective was to create an intelligent mobile-first design for the new Drupal 8 website taking into consideration all the feedback and data gathered to deliver an effective UI/UX for all users involved.

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CMS and Development

WSSCC’s new digital strategy objectives demanded that they upgrade their performance by migrating from WordPress to Drupal 8 in a bid to benefit from the necessary superior UX features and modules.

Vardot built the new Drupal 8 WSSCC website using Varbase - a Drupal 8 distribution kit - that enabled the development team to deliver a fully functional, scalable, and optimized digital experience platform to the client in record time.

The new Varbase CMS enabled the WSSCC to meet their marketing and technical requirements in terms of heavier and more frequent rich media content publishing.

Their new digital strategy and digital marketing objectives required that they eliminate silos between their marketing and technical teams which negatively impacted their ability to personalize their UX and platform in an ongoing and seamless manner.

The content publishing workflow process built-in their new Varbase CMS is moderated via tiered permissions enabling the WSSCC marketing and technical teams to coordinate effectively with each other and no longer work in silos.

WSSCC Water Supply an Sanitation Collaborative Council

In addition to having offices, teams, and members across the globe; the WSSCC communicates with a global and diverse audience of website visitors. Therefore, Vardot built the new Drupal 8 WSSCC website to be search engine optimized for all languages whenever the WSSCC wanted to localize their content.

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Hosting, Ongoing Maintenance and Support

To this date, Vardot maintains and keeps WSSCC website up to date by providing regular maintenance. The website is also hosted using Platform.sh. Vardot provides support for WSSCC communication’s staff to keep the website lively with new content, updates, and reflect needed significant changes on time.

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Why Drupal was chosen

Drupal was chosen because it aligned with the advanced technical requirements that their digital strategy dictates going forward:

  1. Robustness
  2. Performance
  3. Seamless Integrations especially with current stack of technologies including CRMs.
  4. Better SEO
  5. Multilingual Website Features
  6. Ease of Use for non-technical marketing staff

WSSCC Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

Varbase
Varbase is a website builder base distribution that combines powerful editorial features, mobile, lead-generation, SEO, social media integration, and beautiful bespoke designs. Varbase is packed with adaptive functionalities and essential modules.

Varbase was built to reduce the amount of time it takes any Drupal developer to build a high-quality website, it includes over 160 checklists item to implement best practices SEO, performance tuning, security considerations, and best practices in Drupal development.

Varbase is also built utilizing Bootstrap theme, and takes advantage of several Bootstrap-ready modules, all packaged with the base distribution.

Bootstrap
The Bootstrap theme is HTML & CSS, JavaScript framework that is used to create responsive website themes and outlooks. Bootstrap aims to make mobile-first web interfaces.