IATI website project: take a first look
This post has been written by Kate Hughes, IATI’s Technical Delivery Manager at Development Initiatives.
It has been roughly a month since my last update to the IATI community about the technical team’s progress on the website project. We have worked hard on another two sprints and are excited to share our alpha version of the website with you.
We are on track to deliver our new website at the Members’ Assembly (10-11 July, Copenhagen).
The purpose of releasing our alpha is to show the community progress so far in three areas; the design that has been chosen, the style of the new copy, and the technical development of the site.
Help me explain IATI!
For the scope of the first release, we have prioritised building a new About section. From the project’s user research, we know it can often be difficult to gain a basic understanding of IATI.
To uncover the specific problems, we worked with digital agency The Happy Seven who produced a detailed content audit of every page on our current aidtransparency.net site. We reviewed existing pages to look at aspects such the page purpose, reading ease score, average words per sentence and of course google analytics.
The audit has helped inform the creation of a new style guide to write web content, which we hope has significantly improved the way we talk about IATI.
Design
We worked with UX agency fffunction who produced a new simple, clean look for our web pages using IATI’s new brand, including the new logo and colours:
As you’ll notice, we are still working on sourcing photographs for the whole site and have not uploaded all historic documents (for example minutes of meetings). There are also a few pages where the links are missing to other sections of the site that we are still to build.
Currently there are still some bugs for viewing across browser and across device. Once we’ve built out the website in full we will carry out detailed testing to ensure that the experience is more consistent.
We really want your feedback so there is a link to an online survey on the site with a few questions that we’d love you to answer if you have the time.
What’s next?
The technical team have been busy producing new publisher guidance, that we are about to test with organisations publishing data to the IATI Standard for the first time.
View IATI alpha site now: http://alpha.iatistandard.org/en/