Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
Marie Pierce
Danielle Turk
Berlyn Martin
Justin Tran
Michelle McLain
Phil Buckberg
Tsholo Caban
The Aleut Federal website is a critical venue for expressing the company's purpose, values, personality, and business acumen for individuals interested in the company's mission of delivering exceptional value. Our name is synonymous with quality, but our website felt outdated and challenging to navigate. The primary goal of our redesign was to enhance the user experience by improving website navigation, responsiveness, and overall editorial expertise.
Redesign Problem Statement:
1. As a federal employee, I am interested in whether Aleut Federal can be an appropriate contractor for my technological, environmental, infrastructure, or construction needs.
2. As a job seeker, I am curious if Aleut Federal has a position for me that fits my skill background and growth opportunities, financial needs, and logistical situations.
Aleut reorganized its information architecture to address these issues and transitioned to the Drupal platform. This move provides a better editorial experience for internal stakeholders while ensuring consistent branding and an improved user experience for our two major audience types.
About the project
A Brand Redesign with a Flexible and Scalable Design Systems
We optimized Aleut’s color palette to offer modernized color combinations while maintaining accessibility and refreshing the brand with a focus on Aleut’s culture. Flexibility allows the design system to evolve with emerging trends and technologies, while scalability ensures it can grow alongside the company, accommodating new products, services, and audience segments. This approach streamlines design and development processes, reduces redundancy, and enhances efficiency by providing a unified framework. Ultimately, it leads to a more cohesive brand identity, improved user experience, and stronger engagement across touchpoints
An Improved Information Architecture for Users
An improved information architecture brings significant benefits by organizing content to boost usability, findability, and user satisfaction. We gained valuable insights into our audience’s and stakeholders’ needs, behaviors, and preferences through comprehensive research. This research guided our decisions, ensuring the website's structure aligns with users' natural navigation and information-seeking patterns. Key outcomes of the content restructuring include showcasing page value prominently and highlighting essential capabilities for end users. Additionally, a well-organized information architecture supports better content management and scalability, allowing the website to grow and evolve seamlessly over time.
Flow Map for Capabilities
Sitemap
Dynamic content-building experience for Editors
Our developers worked diligently to customize powerful layout builders and paragraphs for dynamic page-building capabilities. These tools allowed us to create customizable layouts from the components built using HTML 5, CSS(SASS), and JavaScript, referencing the design system to meet our audience’s needs.
For ease of page construction, we built a component-based system using Single Directory Components (SDC), Layouts, and the Layout Paragraphs module for a fluid front-end experience building web pages. This build process allows us to more readily train and bring in new content managers who might not have experience with content building in Drupal. Configuration options were added to the components to give site maintainers more fluidity in page composition without requiring a developer to update the code.
Seamless Launch in Drupal 10
Our team of Drupal developers worked thoroughly to ensure Drupal met current requirements while also offering flexibility for future expansion and scalability. Built with Drupal 10 and a mindset on portability to Drupal 11 and beyond, the website has the tools it needs to scale up to any future development needs.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was selected for our website redesign due to its robust, flexible, and secure content management capabilities. Its open-source nature allows extensive customization to meet our stakeholders' specific needs, while its robust security features ensure compliance. Additionally, the platform's flexibility facilitates seamless integration with other systems and improves the editorial experience, ensuring consistent branding, easy content management, and an enhanced user experience for our audience. Finally, shifting the site's administration to a team of in-house Drupal developers and away from a third party allowed the company to assume more ownership of its website with updates that could reflect its rate of growth and scalability.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
