Pestalozzi - New, modern website

The Pestalozzi Children's Village is a nationally and internationally active non-profit organization. Its activities focus on the education of children and young people. The heart of the foundation is the village in Trogen (Appenzell Innerroden), from which all activities in Switzerland and abroad originate.

The organization's website provides information about current projects, events, news and offers the opportunity to interact with the Pestalozzi Children's Village, including the possibility to support its work with donations.

For many years, the website was based on Drupal 7, but with support for Drupal 7 soon to be discontinued, the time had come to switch to a more modern environment.

A relaunch to the latest Drupal version was not only intended to renew the technical framework, but also to modernize and refresh the design and simplify the creation of content for editors.

In addition, the project was to be used to better reflect the foundation's renewed strategy and make content more easily accessible for users.

The Pestalozzi Children's Foundation came into contact with Primer a few years ago: Powerup.ch is based on it, but at that time Primer was heavily adapted to the requirements of the Pestalozzi Children's Foundation's youth radio station.

As part of the foundation's renewed strategy, a new range of events was developed. In order to be able to present this in a suitable form before the relaunch, a Primer project was launched with which Pestalozzi could present the newly conceived events in the village and manage the registration process for them. This allowed those responsible to get to know the possibilities of Primer in a real project and to incorporate this experience into the relaunch concept.

In the first phase of the relaunch project, however, it was primarily the designers and content conceptioners who were challenged: All content was rebuilt from scratch and harmonized with the design. Particular attention was paid to ensuring that the design worked well for both print products and the website. In addition, we were able to draw on our experience with Primer in the village project in order to make the most of Primer's possibilities and greatly reduce the complexity of the project.

Once the design and content were largely defined, a new, additional Primer instance was prepared for the relaunch project.

The first adjustments were then made to the design. The main focus was on the vertical titles and the table of content - two elements that are strongly interlinked and give the content structure and guide users through the site. As vertical text is rather unusual on the web, various challenges were encountered, all of which were successfully overcome
 

Further elements of the design template were then implemented on an ongoing basis and various technical adjustments were made. In close collaboration with the core Pestalozzi team, this enabled steady progress to be made.

Shortly before the go-live, there was an intensive final phase in which Pestalozzi entered the remaining content and translations and the entire website was intensively tested by various people.

After ensuring that everything was in order, the new website successfully went live on August 29, 2023.

The feedback so far from various sources has all been positive. The design of the new website is very successful and gives the Pestalozzi Children's Foundation website a fresh and modern look.

The editors can create different content independently and are getting on very well with the new environment.

We are curious to see whether the data analysis in a few months' time will show that users can find the content they are looking for quickly and whether this will also have a positive impact on online donations.