The Food and Drug Law Institute has several publications, monographs, books, and primers available to both members and non-members to different degrees. Prior to the website redesign, these documents were organized in a journalistic format – for example all books would be in a web page called “Books.” The first part of our strategy was to re-classify all of FDLI’s documents into the audience members they pertain too. For example was this a book about Food, Drugs, Biologics, or something else? By categorizing all of these thousands of resources we could then build a system that would allow their members and researchers to find relevant on their terms.
Through this approach we created landing pages for each type of member of FDLI that would automatically be able to load up the latest relevant documents.
With the heavy lifting out of the way, we were able to then focus on the key calls to action of the site. It turns out nearly all visitors of the site who don’t come for research purposes either come to register for a conference, learn about membership, or to order a publication. Hence – we came up with a very simple menu structure. Researchers who need to find specific documents on a subject matter will have their own landing pages + a super site map at the bottom of the site to target specific information.
The strong red and black of the Food and Drug Law Institute’s logo were heavily used in design. We looked at other prominent organizations like the American Heart Association and Coca Cola Corporation which make heavy use of red and black. This final design was created after 6 iterations with FDLI’s management. For fonts we finalized on the Myriad Pro series discovered at Font Squirrel.
Sitefinity CMS was the obvious choice. With so many custom page templates to support conference information dissemination, publication ordering workflow, and various auto-generated pages, FDLI needed a system they could change on the fly without having to call us. Sitefinity’s “drag and drop everything” editor met the high challenges demanded.
The CMS automatically pulls in the board members information as it is changed in the CRM. It links up with Dynamics CRM and provides for single sign on with their members only portal.
The site includes several basic integrations including Google Analytics, RSS Feeds, Dynamics Member Authentication.
