WSP Environment & Energy New Website Launched

In late 2007, the opportunity arose with long term creative partners Balloon Dog to pitch to WSP Environment & Energy; a subdivision of the global consultancy, WSP Group.

WSP Environment and Energy were looking to branch off and construct their own path of creative and digital presence, to differentiate them from their parent company.

Having successfully been appointed as WSP’s creative and digital agency of choice along with fellow Norwich based agency Balloon Dog, we went to work meticulously planning the website. Balloon Dog was primarily responsible for the design of the site with our guidance, whilst Selesti’s responsibilities were focused on the mammoth job of planning and developing such a huge site.

The planning process was multifaceted and initially started by clearly defining the information architecture of the new website. Once this was agreed, Selesti began writing the detailed technical specification for the work. This included an in-depth explanation for each and every page, outlining the exact functionality that would be seen in the front end as well as determining the finite functionality and how the page would be controlled by the comprehensive content management system.

There were many aspects of the site build which had to be considered in order for it to be as user friendly as possible and suitable for employees to use all over the world, requiring a robust and stable content management system to power it. It was also essential that the CMS was completely flexible to deal with the vast amounts of content which would be added and managed on the site.

The core objectives from the client were that they needed to establish and manage a website that would execute the following:

• Showcase the extensive services down to regional and global levels
• Allow regional offices such as Sweden to have their own manageable homepage in English and native language
• Showcase projects by service and offer downloadable materials such as audio/video, PDFs and images
• Feature uploaded news, latest industry white papers and events
• Display content manageable job vacancies throughout the site and assign specific contact information to each role
• Allow a number of users over a variety of locations across the world to have access to the site to upload content. Permissions needed to be easily managed, in order to restrict some users to some areas and allow others to more.

From these initial objectives the site was built with modern technology at the forefront of the focus. We wanted to ensure that WSP had a website that would withstand the test of time and was constructed with some of the very latest tools available to web developers.

All content uploaded to the site can be done so by stakeholders of the business globally, and the permissions of the user’s content can be restricted by location and also by core areas (i.e. Careers, News, or Projects).

Many of WSP’s key locations in various continents have their own microsites, which can be viewed in the native language where the content allows for this; all country specific homepages can be navigated to from the main locations page here.

The website includes an extensive media centre, enabling them to showcase videos, like here on one of the key expertise pages and audio as shown on one of their career’s pages. The media centre function gives the client the facility to store and share vast amounts of imagery, audio, video and documents which they can call upon at any point whilst editing content on the site.

One of the key features of the WSP site is the ‘callouts’ that can be seen featured on the right hand side of many of its pages . These callouts are instrumental in adding rich content to the site, showcasing important information and linking to both internal and external pages. The site was built to allow various types of callouts to be created, which can be dragged and dropped in the CMS, to relevant pages. These can be video, audio, simple text or image callouts and all can be edited using the pre-defined colour palette, allowing the user to style the media to suit the page they are editing.

The site is now live and has received some great reactions, with many WSP stakeholders all over the world now regularly using the site, to manage their own geographically relevant area. One of the biggest successes has been the ease of using the site, meaning minimal training has been required. The content management system’s straight forward user interface, with drag and drop technology, makes keeping the content fresh and relevant intuitive, quick and simple. This is testament to the success of the information architecture and planning process executed prior to designing or developing a single page.

Further phases of the site will be rolled out later in 2009, with additional elements including a potential e-commerce facility. Other aspects of our full service digital offerings are being considered too, such as search engine optimisation.

Visit: http://www.wspenvironmental.com