I’ve been leading the development of the new Irish Congress of Trade Unions website. This next-generation site has been developed to help make it easier to find information, with both regular visitors and those new to the movement in mind.
One of the priorities was a new, clean and modern graphic design, which has been created to ensure the site is easier to use on mobiles and tablets, but also expands and displays more effectively on larger screens.
The union movement creates a lot of online information in the shape of news, blogs, and publications. As a result, strong information architecture is usually needed to help visitors find what they want. We revamped the whole approach to navigation on the ICTU site, to ensure the navigation experience is consistent throughout the site, and to simplify the navigation options for visitors.
A new ‘What unions do’ area has been added, targeted at those who are not as familiar with the benefits of union membership. This is complemented with an online union finder facility, where the ICTU can find the right union for people in both Northern Ireland and the Republic.
A large amount of out-of-date and fragmented content has been removed while some of the key pages have been revised and rewritten. Removing older content also helps the new site search system, which has been configured with the help of additional algorithms to be more integrated and effective.
The site is built in Drupal, a powerful open-source website system that excels at building larger, content-heavy sites. It’s also very secure and used to power many high-profile sites, such as The White House, Twitter, The Economist, Pfizer, and numerous governments and universities. It’s also popular amongst unions, for example, the TUC and the American AFL-CIO trade union body use Drupal.
When developing a website in the private sector, one of the highest priorities is making sure it ranks well in search engines like Google. This is also important for unions, as getting the movement’s message to appear higher means influencing more people. The new ICTU website has been optimised to help it perform well in search results, helping to get the union message across.
Linked to this is the use of what’s called the ‘semantic’ web, where data behind a webpage is set up to speak to search engines and social media platforms. We’ve used this on the new ICTU websites to help not just with search engines but to make sure the correct information and images are displayed when content is shared on services like Twitter and Facebook.
Hopefully, you’ll find the new site much easier to use, but if you have any feedback or comments, please get in contact.
