The European Federation of Periodontology
Healthcare, Not for profit, Design, UX, Membership Organisation, CMS Development
The European Federation of Periodontology (EFP) is a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting awareness of periodontal science and the importance of gum health. The EFP represents 37 national periodontal societies that includes more than 16,000 periodontists, dentists, researchers and oral-health professionals from Europe and around the world. The EFP also organises EuroPerio, the world’s leading congress in periodontology and implant dentistry.
The Challenge
The EFP’s incumbent agency were no longer able to support the EFP, and the EFP took this opportunity to look for a strategic digital partner to collaborate in producing a best-in-class membership website, modernise their brand and improve the overall user experience and offering for their National Society members.
In particular, the EFP were looking to vastly improve their high performing information pages for the general public, and look to improve the discoverability of the array of publications the EFP produces.
Strategy and Planning with a decentralised organisation
As a decentralised organisation, with many stakeholders, effort was made to make sure we fully understood the organisation operationally, and the different back office functions members of the EFP communications committee used and expected. As well as our usual series of Strategic Content Profiling workshops, we conducted interviews and fact finding across the whole organisation, ensuring the end user of the website was fully represented within our processes as much as the end users of the website.
During our discovery and planning stages, we used techniques such low-fidelity prototyping, user persona generation and content mapping to support the generation of an appropriate and effective website architecture, and that key landing pages were fully optimised.
Building a public facing brand
Of particular focus was the improvement of how Perio health information was displayed to the public. The EFPs main objective is to serve their members, but they also have a mandate to inform and educate the public.
The EFP had committed to adding to their existing content, and we designed and architectured a new ‘patients’ hub, embedded within the main EFP website but with its own branding and identity. We expanded on their original public pages, creating dynamic landing pages, surveys and quizzes, informative frequently asked question pages and clear routing to public resources and campaign material.
Defining a visual aesthetic
Starting with a broad stroke, and collaborating with the EFP website working group, we produced a series of ‘style tiles' or mood-boards. This allowed us to quickly and iteratively explore different tangents of visual design and positioning.
The EFP already had a cohesive and mature brand identity so our job was not to start from scratch with their brand identity, but to gently evolve it, tightening it up and refining, ensuring a modern and appropriate look was achieved, and that this aesthetic was still in keeping with existing marketing collateral.
Once a visual direction had been approved we combined this direction with our core wireframe set. Starting with a few key pages to begin with, the process of defining our design system allowed us to gain client buy in before moving into a more component based approach, creating a suite that could be combined together for endless layout possibilities.
Development & Optimisation
It was a vital requirement that the EFP could ‘self serve’ and take editorial and publishing control over their content. The new EFP website is entirely editable using the enterprise class CMS, TYPO3, and on top of TYPO3’s already powerful publishing functionality, we build custom front end interfaces for the EFP’S member societies, enabling them to also control their society pages and content.
All the EFP publications, news, campaigns and events can be easily found using a powerful search engine and easy to use categorisation system, which exploits TYPO3’s powerful taxonomy tools.
Website performance is really important to us. By using clean, semantic and fast loading code, the website is well optimised for search engines and to improve the load times for users.
The Result
Launched in July 2020, we have created a modern, dynamic and functionally rich member website, offering frictionless access to hundreds of informative documents and publications. We have re-imagined the EFP’s online campaigns, creating a series of rich landing pages all with clear routing to the EFPs archive of resources.
Since launching the site we have also expanded what the site offers, we have recently implemented a payment gateway so the EFP can monetise their content, and we continue to work with the EFP on improvements and developments to the website and back-office functionality, as well as creating an SEO and content strategy road-map for the continuing optimization of their content.
“As a Federation of 37 national periodontal Societies, we needed a company that had international experience, a fresh vision and a comprehensive team. We went through a very creative and constructive period with Liquid Light in developing our new website which is now fully active and has been well received by all our stakeholders.
Without Liquid Light it would have been very difficult for us to find the right balance between our institutional, academic, professional and consumer angles. Technically, the process was smooth and efficient. The result was a blend that we are very happy with and our experience with Liquid Light has been very positive. The Liquid Light team are creative, enthusiastic and able to deliver results. We continue to work with them on an ongoing basis and in the development of new initiatives.”
