The Socialist International is the worldwide organisation of social democratic, socialist and labour parties. It currently brings together (at the time of writing) 147 political parties and organisations from all continents.
The Socialist international has a rich history, with its origins going back to the early international organisations of the labour movement and it has existed in its present form since 1951. Social democratic and socialist parties are now a major political force in democracies around the world and the Socialist International’s membership has grown exponentially to mirror this growth.
The Challenge
The Socialist International had been running the same Cold Fusion website for over ten years, and although it had served them well, an inability to make fundamental changes to the site led the organisation to approach Liquid Light in creating a secure, modern and mobile friendly website for their varied audience.
There was also a need to have a high performing homepage, one that communicated the activity of the Socialst International and its members. The Socialist International also has a huge historical archive of documentation, with some documents going back to thier original inauguration meetings. The ability to have all this content migrated, then easilly discoverable on the website was an important requirement.
The website also needed to be multi-lingual, and serve up translations in Englsih, French and Spanish.
The Process
A big part of this project was getting the site structure right - the Socialist International have a large archive of content going back years, and all their activity is centered around key meetings and events. The Socialist International has several types of event: Committees, Councils, Congresses and Commissions. These events and meetings happen within regular intervals; this event and meeting structure made for a logical information architecture for the new website.
We introduced landing pages for these key events, with the most recent event the ‘hero’ on the page. Visitors could easily scan these landing pages to see the breadth of content, and by using a ‘card’ metaphor for content, these landing pages became visually dynamic pages, that show off the rich content the Socialist International publishes.
We also wanted to give the Socialist International a new and updated design, without losing the heritage and visual associations members had with the organisation. By using styletiles (or moodboards) we were able to rapidly iterate through several rounds of designs and get to a creative direction the Socialist International felt represented their orgainasion in a modern manner, without losing thier heritage.
The Result
We provided The Socialist International with a high performing responsive website, optimised for mobile as well as desktop devices. The site scores in the high nineties across Google’s Lighthouse web app audit tool for overall performance, accessibility, best practise and search engine optimization. We created a clean and modern design that has a classical feel, a nod to their history and heritage.
We implemented the open source enterprise CMS TYPO3 for the Socialist International, and this powerful CMS has given the Socialist International the ability to self serve and make changes to the site structure without having to hire in developers.
Although we do not have GA data from their previous website, it is safe to expect the site to make gains in visitor numbers. By providing a responsive website with a mobile optimised design and build, and by having high Google Lighthouse scores, the new Socialist International site is very ‘Google friendly’ and should now rank higher on search terms within their domain authority.
