Oxfam
Upgrading Oxfam’s policy and practice website
Project overview
In 2020, we helped world renowned charity Oxfam to move their Policy and Practice website, which is their platform for sharing knowledge and learning with external audiences, to WordPress from their previous CMS system. Moving to WordPress has made the website much easier for the team to manage internally.
The brand new, global .org website now pulls several strands of content into one place with a more streamlined design, offering a much improved user experience for the professionals and practitioners around the world who regularly seek policy and practice resources.
Features
- Accessible design
- WordPress migration and custom plugin development
- Improved search
0.89g
CO2 per page view
96%
Lighthouse Accessibility score
0.33s
Page load time
Thank you so much for all of your amazing work in developing our new site! It looks beautiful and I’m really excited being able to showcase our work in a more attractive and accessible way.
Helen Wishart, Editorial Manager
Accessible design
The new site design needed to meet Oxfam’s requirements of accessibility and sustainability, while keeping in line with their recognisable branding. With sustainability at the forefront of all of our work, we were able to create a more dynamic homepage that achieves both of these aims.
Simplifying the design makes the website much faster for those accessing the site with low or limited bandwidth, as well making the new site more accessible through the use of less image heavy design, and more inclusive language.
In order to improve the user experience of the new website, we created custom landing pages aimed at the Policy and Practice site’s specific audience of practitioners, researchers, partners. For each document available, we also highlighted the languages available and page length upfront, being clear about document types and sizes, letting people know how to cite content, including share buttons on every page.
WordPress migration and plugin development
The challenge for this project was the migration of more than 7,000 pieces of content, as well as ensuring the new site would be able to display content from the Oxfam Digital Repository. This repository is a collection of free, publicly available, publications (4,800 at the time of writing) produced by Oxfam.
To meet this challenge, our team developed a WordPress Plugin, which synchronises with the repository, so that all content from the repository can be displayed on the site. This plugin also means that publications can be created, deleted, edited and managed by the team directly via the website, using the standard WordPress post interface. This allows the different research teams across Oxfam to have more ownership of the online presence for their respective areas.
Improved search
The new website is resources-led, recognising that most people see Policy & Practice as the ‘home’ for Oxfam’s wealth of published content. All of the resources from across Oxfam’s wide body of work has been made available via the new site, including adding cover images to every available document, and connecting related articles.
The subject categories for the new site are driven by the publications hosted in Oxfam’s digital repository, where they are categorised by ‘theme.’
Once a theme is selected, The advanced, cross-site search function uses the same themes to direct people to the appropriate content, displaying one of several theme landing pages, each of which display an overview of the theme as well as showing all the search results and highlighting additional external resources that may be useful.
You’ve been the highlight of a challenging project in a challenging year and I’m so grateful for all your wonderful work and the time and attention you’ve put in to deliver our new Policy & Practice! I know the site will make such a difference to the work of Oxfam and so many others.
