Optimizing the haystack: Improving findability in content-heavy websites

With an ever-growing amount of content on the web and our perpetually shrinking attention spans, ensuring findability of digital information has become essential to successful website planning and design. Site visitors want to find the information they need quickly and easily. Low findability is not only frustrating for users but can undermine the performance and credibility of any site.

Now apply this problem to the scale required by an international NGO. Multiply it by the hundreds of entities producing content, then again by an array of document types and language translations available across multiple databases, and an easy content authoring experience to go with it — you get the picture! It was both a challenge for the general public to learn about the NGO’s work and for professionals to access specific niche information.

In this session, Blue State, Dovecot, and Axelerant will discuss our approach to the migration of a 60K+ page website from Sharepoint to Drupal 8. This project highlights the importance of a holistic taxonomy framework to improve the ability of users to find the content they need. A robust taxonomy strategy was developed to bridge all areas of the site, including site search, related links, dynamic content pages, and other taxonomy-driven elements. This structured foundation greatly reduces the editorial overhead, allowing the taxonomy to do the heavy lifting of linking content together and providing accurate information as per user need.